This post is by Scott Butler, executive director of Material Focus.
Despite often being labelled as the UK’s largest waste stream, unwanted electricals aren’t waste. That broken TV in your attic? Those old headphones you’re about to bin? That flimsy charger that stopped working within a week? They’re not waste.
In fact, anything with a plug, battery or cable can be recycled. Electricals contain some of the most valuable materials on our planet, like gold, silver, copper, lithium and more. But, to keep them in the economy, the system for reusing and recycling electricals needs to be much simpler for UK households to use.
Our research shows that, as we buy more and more electricals, we are also throwing away more. We found that we lose nearly £1 billion worth of precious materials to binning, hoarding, theft or illegal exports, which could instead be reused or recycled. Over 103,000 tonnes of small electricals are binned in the UK every year. A further 880 million electrical items gather dust unused in people’s drawers or cupboards; that’s around 30 per household because people aren’t sure what to do with them or how to dispose of them.
The emergence of ‘FastTech’ is accelerating the issue, an issue we identified last October for International E-Waste Day. The trend in small, cheap, throwaway electricals is rising faster than fast fashion, with over half a billion items bought last year, and 90 per cent end up in the bin within a year. Single use ‘disposable’ vapes, the poster child of FastTech, are being bought, vaped and thrown away at a rate of five million a week. And vapes, alongside other battery powered electricals, cause hundreds of fires a year when the batteries inside are crushed in bin lorries.
Doing the right thing needs to be easierOur research shows most people in the UK (76 per cent*) believe recycling electricals is the right thing to do. But less than half (42 per cent*) think it’s easy.
The current system offers inconsistent, confusing and complicated collection methods. Approximately 15 per cent of UK households have kerbside collection, but only a quarter* know it’s available. Everyone can use their local recycling centre but, for those without access to a car, it is difficult to do so.
Some retailers will take unwanted items back without the need for a new purchase, while others only take them back if a similar product is bought. Yet only 12 per cent* of the UK public are aware of this. Even retail staff are often not aware they offer an in-store service, leading to inconsistencies and customer confusion. Our most recent research, which focused on vape take back, discovered that, across the 750 locations we visited, over 90 per cent of stores weren’t providing recycling points.
If it is difficult and confusing electricals will continue to be binned or stashed away, and we will continue to lose precious materials to landfill or someone’s drawer to gather dust. The system needs to make it much easier to reuse and recycle. The government has recently consulted on bringing in changes to producer responsibility rules for electronic waste with this in mind, but it’s not clear yet if and when these reforms will be implemented.
Recycling should be the last resortA lot still needs to be done to tackle e-waste. The first step should be for consumers to buy more mindfully, particularly when it comes to FastTech. The second should be around making it easier for everyone to fix, donate and recycle their electricals, so the materials in them are never wasted. This is what Material Focus believes in, and what we do through our nationwide Recycle Your Electricals campaign.
In fact, we want to make recycling the worst thing you can do, with repairing, reusing, donating and reselling to come before recycling. Binning should never be an option. Our behaviour change analysis found that solutions need to be simple and accessible, so we built a comprehensive online Recycling Locator of over 22,000 locations so people can find their nearest repair, donation or recycling point.
Getting people regularly recycling requires long lasting behaviour change, so selecting times when people are open to change is critical. We target promotion at peak moments for decluttering, like the annual spring clean and when parents clear the decks after their children return to school in September. We also want to interest people in what is considered a lacklustre chore. So we introduced HypnoCat, a pink fluffy, techno loving pied piper of electrical recycling, persuading the nation to bag up and recycle unwanted electricals.
We work with local authorities to improve the UK public’s knowledge and confidence of local recycling options. We also call on retailers to help spread the word of their takeback service, to make it as easy as possible for people to responsibly recycle their electricals.
Our Electricals Recycling Fund helps local communities by introducing kerbside collections, drop-off points in local libraries and community centres and banks to residential areas. So far our latest round of funding has prevented over 63 tonnes of waste electricals going to landfill and introduced 228 new recycling points, serving seven million people.
Reducing unnecessary products, improving reuse and recycling of electricals to keep valuable materials in use requires good information and the implementation of best practice. Reusing and recycling electricals could play a significant role in the development of the UK’s circular economy, as they contain some of the most precious materials on our planet that can be infinitely recycled.
* Material Focus’s annual Bellwether survey aims to measure the UK public’s changing attitudes and behaviours around recycling electricals. It is fielded through The Opinium Omnibus, an online survey of 2,000 UK adults (aged 18 and over). Results are weighted to be nationally representative where relevant. The data is analysed by the market research agency Consumer Insight. The latest Bellwether survey took place from 15 September 2023 to 19 September 2023.
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- Source: https://greenallianceblog.org.uk/2024/05/09/why-are-we-throwing-1-billion-worth-of-precious-metals-in-the-bin/