Clearout

July 2022

I’ve been having a clear out, and that means getting rid of the obsolete, broken or unused bits of equipment that always silt up in a technophile’s cupboards.

But how best to dispose of this stuff? I want as little as possible going into landfill; it is never going to rot down to compost, after all.

In recent years I have taken to kicking the can down the road by selling whatever I can.  I seldom make much money but I do get a bit of a warm feeling about how kind I’m being to the planet, as I assume that if someone is prepared to pay for something, they won’t just throw it away. 

You can sell using eBay, and I have done, but there are a number of companies that will buy fairly recent equipment, and will collect it or pay the postage.  I’ve used uk.webuy.com  and musicmagpie.co.uk but there are many more.  They will often reduce their offer a bit once they see the thing, but once the deal is done, it’s over; no risk of later complaints about quality or condition. 

With eBay you do run the risk of the purchaser moaning about something, but it is good for shifting older things which the retail chaps won’t touch.  I once sold a thirty year old pocket calculator on eBay; it was so ancient it had achieved ‘collectable’ status, and there are collectors who buy them.  Really, there are.

However, nobody wants my old printer that doesn’t work, so I took it and a large bag of cables and chargers to the local dump (sorry, ‘recycling centre’). Under instructions from a laconic staff member I threw them all in the ‘small appliances’ bin, a sad graveyard of once shiny equipment, now abandoned and unloved.

I began to feel guilty.  What will actually happen to the stuff piled up in the skip?  The laconic chap just shrugged and said all he knew was that it was taken away.

But where to? I know that many of the more complex items, especially phones and computers, are full of small amounts of rare metals and minerals that are expensive, and increasingly hard to procure. 

So, I made enquiries; it was a depressing experience.  It turns out that the UK is the world’s second highest producer of what’s known as e-waste, and my printer will probably either be crushed or burned, or both.  Not, as I had hoped, dismantled for the various precious earth elements and other components to be extracted and re-used.  This reclamation is possible, apparently, but it’s really difficult, like giving someone and omelette and asking them to extract an egg from it, and very few places can manage it at any price.

However, it’s a problem that will need to be tackled soon.  The Royal Society of Chemistry (sustainability.rsc.org) recently warned that we risk running out of elements like Indium, which is in touch screens, or gallium, a vital part of  many semiconductors, unless we find a way of extracting them from discarded machines.

Necessity being the mother of invention, scarcity may  solve the problem; once Indium or Gallium become hard to buy, or if the supply chain is disrupted (both those elements come mainly from China), perhaps a way will be found economically to recover what has already been used elsewhere.

I hope so, as it’s the only real hope; it might also encourage the creation of equipment that is easier to dismantle and repair and hence allow us to use it for longer.

The only alternative I can think of is that we all hang on to all our tech until we really do know how to dispose of it sustainably, but I fear it might be a very long wait.