Dele Ogunseitan, a public health and informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine, used a slot at the SAVe Global Conference this week to urge the professional audio-visual industry to take direct responsibility for the e-waste its installations leave behind.

The appeal, as carried by Commercial Integrator, lands on a sector that ships significant tonnage every year. Professional displays, video-wall panels, projectors, control processors, amplifiers and signal-distribution gear routinely outweigh the consumer electronics flowing through the same waste streams, and most of it carries lead solder, brominated flame retardants and other substances heavy enough to trigger Extended Producer Responsibility rules in the EU, the UK and a growing list of US states.

What does the call change for an integrator on the ground?

Three pressures, in practice. First, bid language — major buyers (universities, hospital systems, government agencies) are increasingly scoring AV proposals on circularity metrics as part of their own ESG disclosures, and a growing share of state and federal RFPs now ask bidders to disclose electronics-stewardship compliance. Second, asset-disposal contracts — integrators running lifecycle services for clients are now specifying the recycling or refurbishment pathway at the point of install rather than at decommission. Third, client reporting — California's Electronic Waste Recycling Act, plus parallel programs in New Jersey and New York, already cap how certain AV hardware enters state-collected recycling streams and what producers must take back per pound sold.

Ogunseitan's published research points to the gap behind the lecture. Global e-waste reached roughly 62 million tonnes in 2022 by the UN Global E-waste Monitor's count, and the same agency tracks annual growth at around 8% — putting the stream on course for 82 million tonnes by 2030. Only about 22% of that mass is documented as formally recycled; the rest is landfilled, incinerated or processed informally, often in regions with weaker worker-protection regimes. AV and IT equipment, folded together, accounts for a substantial share of that volume by weight.

For the SAVe Global audience — system designers, manufacturers, distributors and integration channel partners — the timing sits inside a known industry calendar. AVIXA's flagship event, Integrated Systems Europe runs in Barcelona in early February. That floor is where circularity commitments and sustainability roadmaps have historically been paired with new product launches, and where channel partners get the first read on whether a pledge translates into spec language.

What happens next?

Whether integrators and manufacturers put takeback, refurbishment or design-for-disassembly commitments on the record before or at ISE 2026, and whether institutional buyers start writing those commitments into scoring matrices rather than optional checkboxes.

Until then, Ogunseitan's appeal functions less as a new policy than as a deadline: the AV channel has a venue and a window to convert a call-out into a documented commitment, and the next major industry gathering is the natural place to do it.