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Earth

Half a Billion Cheap Electrical Items Go To UK Landfills in a Year, Research Finds (theguardian.com) 63

Almost half a billion small, cheap electrical everyday items from headphones to handheld fans ended up in landfill in the UK in the past year, according to research. The Guardian: The not-for-profit organisation Material Focus, which conducted the research, said the scale of the issue was huge and they wanted to encourage more recycling. More than half a billion cheaply priced electronic goods were bought in the UK in the past year alone -- 16 per second. Material Focus findings showed that of these items, 471m were thrown away. This included 260m disposable vapes, 26m cables, 29m LED, solar and decorative lights, 9.8m USB sticks, and 4.8m miniature fans.

Scott Butler, executive director at Material Focus, described it as "fast tech." He said: "People should think carefully about buying some of the more frivolous ... items in the first place." He said the items people bought were often "cheap and small," and that consumers may not realise they contain valuable materials that could be salvaged if recycled. Small electricals can contain precious materials including copper, lithium and stainless steel. These components can be recycled and used in wind turbines, medical devices and electric vehicles. Material Focus said that while people were used to the idea of recycling larger electrical items such as fridges, lots of smaller devices were left unused in houses.

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Half a Billion Cheap Electrical Items Go To UK Landfills in a Year, Research Finds

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  • Nope (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12, 2023 @11:52AM (#63920761)

    Small electricals can contain precious materials including copper, lithium and stainless steel. These components can be recycled and used in wind turbines, medical devices and electric vehicles.

    Yes, it is all very wasteful and yes technically those "precious materials" **COULD** be recovered and recycled. But, there is a very simple reason why they aren't. The cost of recovery is greater than the value of the materials. That is not a sustainable model.

    • Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MysteriousPreacher ( 702266 ) on Thursday October 12, 2023 @12:14PM (#63920799) Journal

      That's the thing. Unless you have a pipeline from recycling to manufacturing then recycling doesn't go anywhere. What is the cost attached to manufacturing/selling frivolous products that have a useful life measured in hours, yet whose waste is likely to outlast the grandchildren of the purchaser?

      • by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

        Or get the tech perk that automatically breaks down junk items.

        (I just need to find what happend to it after the Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update)

      • What's the address for Material Focus? Should we start sending our electronic "trash" to them so they can recycle it? While it's great and easy to say "you should recycle it", not everyone has a convenient way to recycle. I've thought and said for years there should be places to drop of glass, aluminum, and plastic at grocery stores. I'm going there anyway to get groceries why not drop off the cans I've collected. Where I live we don't have separate bins for regular trash and recycle-ables.
        • It's reasonable to require shops to accept waste of the kind of products they sell. For bigger items, accepting the waste when buying a new product.

          • This doesn't fix the problem at the other end. You can collect as much waste as you want, without a system of breaking it down and re-using it all you're doing is making a different landfill.

      • What is the cost attached to manufacturing/selling frivolous products that have a useful life measured in hours, yet whose waste is likely to outlast the grandchildren of the purchaser?

        Not much, it just lays there in the landfill forever. Unless it's hazardous somehow, it's not going to cost anyone anything.

    • I'd quit throwing away so many cables if they would quit failing on me all of the time. I've probably thrown away 100 dead USB charging cables. I keep trying different brands hoping to find a reliable one. Even tried those steel armored USB cables. Armor lasted fine, cable inside of it still broke.

      • I'd quit throwing away so many cables if they would quit failing on me all of the time. I've probably thrown away 100 dead USB charging cables. I keep trying different brands hoping to find a reliable one. Even tried those steel armored USB cables. Armor lasted fine, cable inside of it still broke.

        WOW.

        Just curious what the hell do you do to your USB cables that is so tough on them? What kinda environment are you in?

        I'm thinking and honestly, I can only think of 2.5 cables that have gone bad on me in the

        • Kids!

          • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
            They say the first step to finding a solution is identifying the problem.
          • Have you tried Anker cables? They hold up better than OEM for my kids but even then it's mostly only Apple OEM cables we've had fail, small handful of micro USBs because the tabs wear off. Certainly no where near 100 though... maybe a better 'charging station' would be helpful?
        • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
          Since the roll-out of the oval USB3 connector the problem has gone WAY down for me. The Micro-USB connector was an atrocious choice for charging things like a phone. They are SUPPOSED to be good for 10,000 cycles, but I feel like in practice less than 1000 is more accurate.
        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          I have definitely seen USB cable failures. Mostly the connectors wear and no longer hols in the socket at all. Many get to the point that they will fall out under their own weight. I have seen some though where a conductor breaks and others where the fingers wear thin and make poor contact. Most of the failures have been micro USB.

      • It's a trade off of convenience. If they used the form factor for an old DB25 parallel port connector it'd probably work forever because they could use thicker wires and thumb screws hold the cable secure to the port.

        With a USB cable though the tiny form factor people want on phones necessitates tiny wires with tiny solder points that inevitably break.

        And building too many things together doesn't help either. My 32" Roku TV in my bedroom is aging out of use. The display portion is just fine but the built

        • You aren't wrong in your assessment but we have to change as a society. We literally live in a throw away society that doesn't appreciate repairing things. Sometimes things don't even have to be broken before we replace them because *oh shiny*!

        • Honestly I really wonder how much it would help global warming by just building things that are durable, high quality, and last. AND making them easier to repair rather than just throw away when they break. IE smart TVs should have a standardized slot where the "smart" portion of it can be popped out and replaced as needed. Standardize an API so that the device could change channels, reference the various HDMI outputs, control volume, etc.

          I want to put one more factor in here, or at least explicitly, - not just easier to repair, but easier to modify and upgrade. I think you covered it with mentioning replacing the smart portion, but I think you could have been more explicit about having the replacement provide upgraded capabilities.

          For example, your Roku is getting slow - This could be everything from thermal management limiting your speed because of cruft buildup insulating parts so they're getting too hot otherwise to Roku deliberately s

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The cables are designed to break before the device does. If you got an indestructible one, you would just break the port on your gadget instead.

        That said, I don't think I've ever managed to break a USB cable. Maybe you have kids.

    • If they actually cared they would make it illegal to sell devices without easily replaceable batteries. But they give zero fucks about the environment and want to keep getting the tax money on sales of shit.

    • Agree: And recycling's has been pushed onto us by the manufacturers so that they can wash their hands of the responsibility. Even when it works as it should, it still isn't sustainable. We just need to buy less stuff & make it last longer. How about statutory warranties on all items, safe disposal deposits, requirements to repair rather than replace, etc.. That'd drive up the quality & price of items so that people are more careful about how many they buy & they should last longer.

      And not jus
    • If you go long enough, no model is truly "sustainable". If you accept that things will change on occasion, they can last quite long however.

      Hell, you wait long enough geological activity will bring new metal deposits into mineable locations.

      Anyways, when I was in college I did some work for mining simulation, resulted in me reading up on it. There's one mine location, for example, that has been open for the last 150 years or so, with zero mining activity for like the last 100.

      What has been happening is th

    • Small electricals can contain precious materials including copper, lithium and stainless steel. These components can be recycled and used in wind turbines, medical devices and electric vehicles.

      Yes, it is all very wasteful and yes technically those "precious materials" **COULD** be recovered and recycled. But, there is a very simple reason why they aren't. The cost of recovery is greater than the value of the materials. That is not a sustainable model.

      What's the cost of not doing landfills? What's the cost of less waste in manufacturing and purchasing and maintenance? Or perhaps a better way to put it, is what is the value of those things to us? What's that worth to society?

      I truly hate to sound like some hippie... Lord knows I'm not... but the accumulation of trash and the way modern society both cheaply acquires stuff and then cheaply throws it away en masse has been bothering me for a few years. I've come to think we'd be better off with an ethos of m

  • We call that kind of stuff "Chinese landfill". And it's not always electronics: It includes every stupid trinket you take home from a seminar.
  • by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Thursday October 12, 2023 @12:03PM (#63920785) Journal

    I throw old broken or obsolete electronic items in a crate which I take to the electronics recyclers every six months or so. But I have no idea what THEY do with the items, or whether the items can even be recycled. They could throw them in a landfill and I'd be none the wiser.

    • Sometimes all you can do is try your best

    • by pereric ( 528017 )

      Can only answer for Sweden. It's usually taken to some regional processing place, where plastic covers and less valuable stuff is removed (ideally also for recycling but probably mostly being burned). It's then sorted, with the extra nasty stuff (like mercury valves, anything of risk containing asbestos or PCB) being removed and handled to dangerous waste processing. Steel parts are sent for steel recycling.

      Circuit boards, cables, electric motors and anything with non-ferrous metals is sent to a big smelter

  • Human civilization's inability to recycle complex waste is one of the peak everything cliffs hanging over it.

    Pyrometallurgy with hydrogen reduction is the only practical way I see, but even if perfected now, virgin material from minerals is likely always going to be far cheaper. What humans should do now though is presort waste to the best of our abilities, so when we inevitably run out, we at least don't have to start recycling from random landfill.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Wire - chopper/shaker. Plastic goes into landfill. Metal goes into standard Cu refinement stream.
      Everything else, industrial shredder/grinder. Bulk ferrous metals - magnetic separation and into arc furnace. Rest, ball-mill, turn to powder. Ferrous metals - magnetic separation. Into the arc furnace you go. Everything else, various flotation/separation/chemical process to refinement.

      I find it interesting that we can refine Cu, Al, precious metals, etc. out of the ground economically when they are at wa

    • The recycling problem is basically entropy at work. When you mine a material you're taking it from large deposits, and spreading it out all over the place during the manufacturing process. Its likely never going to be energy efficient to recollect those materials and bring them back together for reprocessing & redistribution yet again.

      There are some exceptions. EG aluminum cans where the material is still relatively homogenous, or large steel items like beams, rebar, car axles, etc, but I'd wager the

      • There is defacto infinite energy, there are limited easily accessible mineral deposits.

        Especially if stuff is sorted a bit now instead of just dumped together in landfill, the time to transition won't be too far ahead. Peak everything is here already.

    • by irving47 ( 73147 )

      The plastics alone seem like it would be too hard. "Gee, is this polyethylene or polystyrene? Does it matter if it's LDPE or HDPE? What about those polypropylene bags filled with the ABS crap from the 3D printer? Is it the same as the PETG coke bottles? Should the PLA go in there with it?"

      • Making a near infinite variety of plastics is a stupid.

        Once the oil industry dies down, if there is still a global technological civilization they'll probably move to having a small handful of persistent plastics. Fully compostable plastics can be tailored however you want, but the persistent ones need to be legally standardized for easy recycling.

  • by Wycliffe ( 116160 ) on Thursday October 12, 2023 @12:23PM (#63920819) Homepage

    Just like cigarette butts, recycling them isn't probably an option but getting people to switch to reusable vapes seems like an easy win.
    I'm honestly surprise that disposable vapes are so popular. I'm surprised they don't take the razor route and give away
    cheap reusable vapes at or below cost and make the money back on selling cartridges.

    That's an easy win and reduces this by over half.

    • A disposable vape ban is planned EU-wide in 2026. Member countries are free to ban them earlier e.g. France Dec 2023, other countries including Ireland are likely to bring in a ban sooner. Even the UK govt is making noises, but hasn't announced anything yet.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Disposable vapes appeal to children. They don't want to hide a vape from their parents/school, they just want to use it and dispose of it. The low cost also puts them in impulse buy range.

  • Yes, this is the Story of Stuff - everyone should watch the Youtube series hosted by Annie Leonard if they haven't already. So many times I've bought USB cables or chargers that simply are designed to fail or use such cheap components they don't last a month - and I doubt anyone wants to try to take the time and salvage the metals out of them. I wonder if my old Tandy 1000 we got rid of in 1993 is sitting compacted some 27 meters below the upper surface of the county landfill, or that old Nutribullet blen
    • by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

      There were a few SF stories in the '90s that had a guy time travelling to the future and the folks there praising 20th century foresight in sequestering metals underground.

  • The world got the environmental movement completely backwards. We should be making products that last. That are repairable and/or stay compatible for more than 2 years. But of course such a thought it's completely against the bosses of companies who manufacture our everyday appliances and devices who are well aware that lasting products slow down sales and don't make money.

    • For the most part, you CAN get products that last. You just won't like the price.

      You can get a blender for $20 that might break in a year, or one for $200 that does the same thing but will be inherited by your grandchildren, as long as the pitcher isn't broken. You can buy replacement pitchers, but they're over $20.

      It's better when the "breaks quickly" device is like $20, and the "lasts forever and repairable" is only $40.

      For things like cellphones, well, we were in a period of high development - wait 2-3

    • We should be making products that last. That are repairable and/or stay compatible for more than 2 years.

      Well, we used to, until I guess the late 80's or so?

      I mean, look at mechanical film cameras...old Leica's, Hassy's and many others STILL work just fine, often with little maintenance, or maybe just a good cleaning and lube....we're talking 50-100 year old mechanical cameras working just fine and taking very good images still.

      That's just an example...but in the past, people were "shade tree mechanics"

      • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        Appliances are a better example. Take something like a stove. I just replaced mine, the original was a genuine 1980s unit that still technically worked just fine. The only reason I replaced it was fuggin ugly, and I hated the cast-iron burners with a passion typically reserved for ex wives, slow drivers, and stepping on a lego. That thing was built like an absolute tank. It just FELT beefy, nothing flexed, the grates were nice and sturdy, etc. The new one has sharp metal edges everywhere, everything f

    • Lasting products could be worth it, but knowing how well something is built is really, really hard for a consumer to know. The result is we'd rather take a known crappy product for a low cost than risk overpaying for something that has a high chance of being just as junky but makes you feel like a dupe for buying.

      Successful well built products with a good reputation inevitably become targets for some private equity monolith to take over the parent company and milk the reputation into the ground. Higher pr

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Its not quite that simple though.

      My late 1990s vintage refrigerator has all the features I really want. I'll probably just keep it as long as it keeps 'humming along' but a new one probably would be more energy efficent. Which depending on where my energy comes from might or might not be ecologically a better choice.

      On the flip side, what would anyone ever want with a late 90s vintage PC? Its not 'interesting' in the way an earlier machine might be in terms historical note worthiness. I mean if you have s

  • by sidetrack ( 4550 ) on Thursday October 12, 2023 @02:58PM (#63921161) Homepage

    Fun fact - disposable vapes use fully rechargeable lithium ion battery cells. The battery cells contain fluorinated hydrocarbons (including yer good old PFAS "forever chemicals"), as well as metals like nickel and cobalt.

    Lithium ion batteries are capable of 100s to 1000s of cycles. These get 1.

    But the vape manufacturers ensure they only use batteries made from ethically sources cobalt, right?

    I'd be amazed if 5% of them get recycled. In the past couple of years I have literally picked up hundreds of these off the ground.

    • I'd be amazed if 5% of them get recycled. In the past couple of years I have literally picked up hundreds of these off the ground.

      You toughed inadvertently on a far more fundamental discussion. How can we expect to have a functioning recycling program if people are too fucking lazy to even use a public bin to throw away what they perceive is trash. Someone who can't keep their shit with them until they get to a bin sure as heck won't be holding onto it even longer so they can recycle it.

  • This is the price of having a consumer society which is dependent on capitalism. Everybody produces cheep and "good enough" stuff, which breaks after a short while, and there's an actual demand for cheep and "good enough" stuff. Those producing cheep and "good enough" stuff outproduce and outprice those who produce quality but expensive. The demand goes to cheep and "good enough", and so the quality but expensive becomes more expensive... and so the vicious circle continues.

    Perhaps those dreaming up laws an

  • Try and simplify your life and give up frivolous junk, it will do wonders for your mind and more importantly, the environment... if you want to you can even call it a patriotic act to stop buying foreign-made crap! As a semi-famous quote goes "the things you own end up owning you".
  • If I could buy decorative string lights that lasted for more than three weeks, I would. But this product doesn't exist. The drive-price-to-the-bottom mentality has resulted in there being few quality products available (and the greed for more and more profit by getting you to buy a replacement every year). Blaming the consumer for greedy, cheap-out activities by the manufacturers is unproductive and unhelpful.
    • Lightbulbs too.

      I would much rather spend £10 on a bulb and not have the capacitors shit themselves after a few years than the current drive to the bottom of price, price, price.

      It's hard to find quality ones.

      Though for big ones it's actually fine. I've got two bigass bulbs designed for commercial and street light use. One's actually a SON retrofit. Rated for 50,000 hours and bright. 30 W I think one of them is maybe 20. Cost 40 quid each or so. Doing fine on an area of my house where they are in

    • If I could buy decorative string lights that lasted for more than three weeks, I would.

      I've been using the same decorative string lights for 6 years now. But I had to spend more than $10 on them. This is *YOUR* fault. The production is there, you just either don't seek it out or don't want to pay for it.

      Do yourself a favour, cancel Amazon Prime, delete Best Buy from your Google Maps frequented destinations, and actually go to the many shops selling high quality goods available to you. And there are, even if you've never bothered to look for them.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Buy a "name brand" Westinghouse fridge-freezer. Use it until it dies (~5 years). Discover that you can't get replacement parts for it, so it's a actually throw-away item. You can't just take it to the whitegoods pile on the tip because it's got less than a litre of "toxic" refrigerant in it, so you have to pay someone to take it away and deal with it... but all those services are happy to come and give you "free quotes!"

    We live in a throw-away society because governments don't enforce repairability and recy

    • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      The Westinghouse company that you're thinking of hasn't built a consumer good since 1975. The PoS fridge you bought was made by some OEM company that was contracted by Paramount Global (Yeah, that one. [wikipedia.org]) to build a passable 5-year fridge and slap the "Westinghouse" name on it.
  • The UK has whatdisposable income is *not*

  • ... larger electrical items ...

    Because larger items are mostly metal and glass, small items are half plastic, half metal. At the moment, we can't clean, disassemble and recycle all-plastic items, we don't have a chance with plastic glued to metal: That covers everything from razor-blades to furniture. There's a lack of pipeline (from domicile to smelting/shredding plant) and a 'not my problem' lack of effort by consumer, manufacturer and government. (It's rubbish, nobody will clean and disassemble it.)

    Capitalism creates efficient s

  • Make the manufacturers pay for the disposal. Most of that stuff is tossed because it broke and cannot be repaired.

    It wouldn't hurt to adopt standards so things can be upgraded as well. Many here may not remember, but there was a time when you could upgrade a PC by putting in a better CPU that wasn't even being made when you originally bought the PC.

    If smartphones had easier to replace batteries and available spare parts, they would probably be used a lot longer before hitting the landfill. Even if you want

    • You can still upgrade Cpu, it's just usually not worth it and rarely was in the past TBF.

      I could upgrade my Zen2 to a 3, but it's relatively expensive for an upgrade given the relatively slight performance bump. The newer ones need new everything to support higher RAM capacity and of course speed. Even then CPUs are now good for quite a few years for most things.

  • it may be time for regulation requiring that all products be repairable by the end user. Look at the fair phone for an example. repairing doesn't eliminate the waste stream but it does greatly reduce it.

The computer is to the information industry roughly what the central power station is to the electrical industry. -- Peter Drucker

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