Introduction: E-waste is increasing across Southeast Asia (SEA), yet comparative evidence on its socioeconomic factors remains limited. Prior research is dominated by single-country case studies and inconsistent measures, obscuring the relative roles of population, income, urbanization, and electricity access. This study harmonizes official statistics for 11 SEA countries—Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam—to quantify these relationships.
Methods: Cross-sectional log-linear ordinary least squares (OLS) models were estimated with outcomes ln(total e-waste, million kg) and ln(e-waste per capita, kg/person), regressed on ln(population), ln(GDP per capita), urbanization (average annual rate, 2010–2023), and urban electricity access (0–1). Official datasets from the Global E-waste Monitor 2024, the World Bank, Worldometers, Asian Development Bank, and United Nations were harmonized and standardized. Robustness was assessed via variance corrections, residual diagnostics, multicollinearity tests, and leave-one-out refits.
Results: Total e-waste rises mainly with population and secondarily with income, while per-capita generation is driven by economic development rather than population density. Urbanization and electricity access show no independent effect once these are controlled. Diagnostic checks confirm the models’ stability, with results robust across specifications and unaffected by singlecountry influence.
Conclusion: E-waste production in Southeast Asia is structurally shaped by demographic scale that drives aggregate volumes, while affluence explains per-capita intensity. Urbanization and electricity access, though often cited as modernization indicators, show no independent relationship once population and income are controlled. These findings establish a regional baseline for understanding and tracking e-waste drivers.