Reducing the mountain of e-waste

The UK produces about 6 million tonnes of e-waste annually, of which households are responsible for about 400,000 tonnes each year. That's not just phones, laptops, and computers - an ever increasing number of products and appliances now incorporate some electronics, and anything with a plug or battery qualifies as e-waste.

The ways to reduce the amount of waste generated ought to be familiar to readers. We need to only buy what we need, extend its life so it needs to be replaced less often, and responsibly dispose of it when it has come to the end of its useful life.

If electrical equipment really is broken, then there are some stores that will take the item, or the recycling bins for small electricals are the place to go. (South Cambridgeshire, Cambridge City.)

Coming up shortly, International e-Waste Day is on October 14th.

Did you know that on average, households have 22 cables that they can no longer identify, let alone use? Some participating local repair cafes will be encouraging visitors to bring along their unwanted electrical cables which will then be passed on to the charity Emmaus for the benefit of the community there.

Here in Cambridge, the Centre for Computing History has a project called Broken Tech: Broken Earth that aims to explore how the explosion in technology over the last 80 years has impacted the local and global environment. As part of that project, they're holding an E-Waste Art Workshop and Exhibition on October 11th.

If you have tech that's viable but YOU no longer need it, you can also pass it on to people like Retapp, Sustainable Tech 4 Good or Every Child Online.

And then, if you have small electrical items that are not quite working but might be repairable, then the repair cafes might be worth visiting. (Generally for computing equipment there are enough phone and computer repair shops around that you should use those businesses rather than the repair cafes.)

For computers in particular, there are simple upgrades that can significantly extend the life of older equipment. Not only does this reduce e-waste, but also directly reduces carbon emissions as such a large proportion of a device's lifetime emissions are embedded in manufacturing. For example, replacing on old hard disk drive with a new solid state drive will transform a computer's performance. Or increasing the amount of installed memory will allow today's increasingly bloated systems and applications to run more smoothly.

That doesn't always help if the manufacturer or supplier has decided to no longer offer support for a device. Some products listed in The Electronic Waste Graveyard became unsupported, and thus useless, after a relatively short life.

At the largest end of the scale, tens of millions of PCs and laptops that are currently working just fine will be made obsolete because they cannot run Windows 11, and Windows 10 support will come to an end shortly (although you can pay for extended support, and key applications such as web browsers will continue to receive updates for a few years yet). This equipment can be given a new lease of life by installing an open source operating system such as Linux. Sadly, there isn't a local movement like End of 10 that can offer help and run installation parties, but there are many of us who have been using free and open source operating systems for many years quite successfully.