Electronic waste is having a
huge impact on the environment
by contaminating soil, water
and even the air around us.
But there is a solution to this problem.
What if the next time
you bought a kettle on Amazon
they took away your old one for free?
In the UK we actually produce
more e-waste per person than any
country in the world
apart from Norway.
Everyone each year is producing
23.9kg worth of electronic waste,
which is more than you'd be allowed
to take onto an aeroplane
in a big suitcase and that compares
to a smaller average
in the EU, it's just 16 kg per person,
and actually the global average
is only around 7 kg per person,
so we're three times worse
than the average country.
E-waste is complicated,
so here are three areas
we're going to focus on
and what we think can fix them.
Repairability, making recycling easier
and wasting precious materials.
So, why is it so hard to repair
broken electronics?
Yeah, so I mean manufacturers
are doing everything to lock out
independent repairers
by making it difficult
for them to access information
about a certain product
and how to repair it
but these are restricted
from manufacturers
but often third parties
get them through
other people through leaks,
but that's not ideal.
And then there's
the affordability of spare parts
where manufacturers are keeping
the cost of genuine spare parts
artificially high.
Another issue manufacturers
have created is the
gluing and soldering of parts.
Instead of simply screwing
components into devices
or using ports that components
can slip in and out of,
manufacturers have opted to start
using glue to fix components in place
and solder to connect
components together.
With the claim that this makes devices
more durable.
Manufacturers themselves have
products that show that they can
both be durable and repairable.
So this question of whether
making something repairable
makes it less, lets say, waterproof.
It’s bogus.
Imagine you need to change the
tyre on a car
but the wheel has been
welded to the axle.
That tyre just became a lot more
difficult and expensive to change.
You know, with too much glue
and with soldered in components
the price of repairs goes up
and DIY repairs become much
less viable.
So if electronics can't be repaired,
how are they being thrown away?
In the UK we create
1.5 million tonnes of e-waste a year.
Two thirds of that is not recycled.
Of that two thirds
155 thousand tonnes are thrown out
in household waste,
sending it to landfill or incineration.
The amount of e-waste
we throw out every year weighs
the same as 15 Eiffel towers.
So what can be done
to encourage more people to recycle
their electronics?
As of January 1st, 2021, all High Street
electronic retailers in the UK
must take any small e-waste
a customer brings them and send it on
to a recycling facility.
This responsibility
only applies to High Street retailers.
Why do the online companies
get exemption from this?
Some online retailers
have voluntarily implemented
this into their service,
such as Dixons Carphone.
Yes, we rolled out our small box
collection service at the end of 2018
in its full first year of operation 2019,
we actually saw an increase of 215%
of small electricals that we collected
whenever a customer
has a home delivery for big items
such as a fridge,
washing machine or large screen TV.
We have a service in place
where we will take away
their old one, in addition to that service
at the same time they can hand
over any small electrical item
and will take that way for free
to be recycled as well.
So it is perfectly possible
for online retailers to adopt
a convenient e-waste recycling service.
Yet Amazon, the UK's
biggest online retailer, does not offer an
easy to use service like this.
I think the reason must be very simple
that actually it's a bit of a faff
and it adds extra cost to them
and so they are not interested
in providing that level of support,
and that's very distressing.
If we make e-waste recycling easy
we will get higher recycling rates.
It's that simple.
Imagine a world where
every online retailer including Amazon,
picked up your unwanted
small electronics from your front door
whenever you received
a delivery from them.
If it was that convenient
wouldn't you recycle more?
Sending e-waste to landfill means
we lose critical raw materials
also known as CRMs.
So these are minerals and metals
that exist in the earth
in finite quantities,
and they are also things
that we tend to need a lot of
and are increasingly needing more of.
CRMs come from all over the world,
and most crucially
are in limited supply.
Many of these critical raw
materials are used
in our personal electronic devices
like our phones and our laptops,
but they're also
really important
for things like healthcare
for surgical implants, new medicines,
and also renewable energy
and electric vehicles.
Some CRMs are so rare
they are predicted to run out completely
by the end of the century.
At the moment we're
really losing a lot of value,
we're losing a lot of critical raw
materials because at the moment
still there is really a need
to have processes,
but also the infrastructure
to go hand in hand with that
to extract these type
of critical raw materials
from more devices
more efficiently.
-We need to invest in the science,
so at the moment the science to extract
the really small quantities of metal
and separate them out from each other
is still in its infancy.
So that's a really important thing
that we have to work on.
So, how do we fix the e-waste problem?
Make electronics easier
and more affordable to repair.
Require all retailers,
including online ones,
to be responsible
for the collection and disposal
of small, unwanted electronics.
Invest more money
in adopting more efficient
recycling processes.
By accepting recommendations like this
maybe we can make pictures like this...
a thing of the past.
As a House of Commons committee,
we're in a position
where we can actually make
recommendations on issues like this
directly to the government, so we did.
As part of our inquiry, electronic waste
and the circular economy,
we made these three recommendations,
as well as 24 others, to the government
who are obligated to respond to them.
And they have, the government
response includes new rules for
manufacturers who must now make
spare parts available for white goods
such as fridges and washing machines
along with electrical goods like TVs
and from the summer of 2021
these new rules will be
a legal obligation in the UK
marking the first steps towards
a circular economy, where we use
reuse and recycle products.
If you want to read our report in full
along with the government's response
to our recommendations, you can
at parliament.uk/EAcom