New research shows the UK’s consumption of small ‘FastTech’ electricals is becoming an issue set to outstrip Fast Fashion, in terms of the amount sent to landfill. ‘
FastTech’ refers to everyday small electrical items, from headphones to cables, decorative lights to mini fans and even single-use vapes. These items often have a short lifespan and cost, on average, £4. This means they may be seen as ‘disposable’ (47% of us don’t expect cheaper electricals to last long), even when they’re not designed to be.
This emerging issue is the tip of the iceberg of a bigger challenge of electrical waste in the UK, with the valuable materials contained inside these items – gold, aluminium, and lithium – lost forever when thrown away.
The in-depth study conducted by Material Focus as part of the Recycle Your Electricals campaign to mark International E-Waste Day (this Saturday 14th October) reveals over half a billion FastTech items were purchased in the last year alone – one every sixteen seconds.
Nearly a half a billion of these (471m) end up in landfill per annum including: 260 million disposable vapes, 26 million cables (enough to go round the earth five times), 29 million LED, solar and decorative lights, 9.8 million USB sticks, 4.8 million mini fans and more!
Every year, the average UK adult buys nine FastTech items and throws away eight (90% thrown away), buying FastTech for a wide range of reasons from replacing a broken item (39% of UK adults) or as a fun novelty (8%). It’s no surprise, therefore, that some of the most likely items of FastTech to be binned include mini speakers, handheld vacuum cleaners and step counters.
With annual spend on FastTech passing the £2.8 billion mark for reportedly the first time in 2023, Material Focus is sharing a timely reminder that anything with a plug, battery or cable can be recycled. It’s never been easier or simpler to recycle your unwanted tech – any UK resident can find their nearest drop off point thanks to its Recycling Locator which has over 16,000 recycling points.
To highlight the vast amount of precious materials that are hidden inside electrical items that are being thrown away, the not for profit commissioned and worked with visual tech pioneer, Lumafield, on a series of fascinating 3-D CT scan images and video clips. The images show the surprising amount of precious materials contained in small electricals, from copper to lithium to stainless steel. Lumafield’s pioneering Neptune industrial CT scanner captured hundreds of X-ray images of each product from different angles, and its Voyager software reconstructed these images into 3D visual models that reveal both external and internal details.
Scott Butler, Executive Director, Material Focus, which runs the Recycle Your Electricals campaign, says, “FastTech is seriously rivalling Fast Fashion, and is causing similar headaches. People should think carefully about buying some of the more frivolous FastTech items in the first place. But as FastTech items are quite cheap and small, people may not realise that they contain valuable materials and will just pop them in the bin, meaning we lose everything inside them instead of recycling them into something new. We want to get the message across that anything with a plug, battery or cable can be recycled and there’s somewhere near you to do it. The scale of the issue is huge, but there’s an easy solution – just as the trend for recycling and repurposing fashion has grown and grown, we want to encourage the nation to recycle FastTech, guilt and fuss-free.”
FastTech is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to wasted electricals in the UK. Although, the total number of electrical items thrown away has decreased since 2017 (103 thousand tonnes of electricals are thrown away every year, down 34% partly due to lighter weight items) and more and more people are recycling (60% of people say they regularly recycle their electricals, up from 52% in 2021). However, a staggering 880 million household electricals are lying unused in UK homes. That’s a 67% increase compared to when the research was last conducted three years ago. The average household now has 30 items gathering dust!
Whilst as a nation we’ve got used to the idea of recycling our large electrical items like washing machines, fridges and TVs, there’s currently an incredible number of small unused electricals in cupboards, lofts, garages and under beds. Cables, mobile phones and headphones/earphones are the most likely to be lying dormant in homes across the country. In the average UK home, there are four or five charging cables, two or three mobiles phones and two or three remote controls cluttering up cupboards! Overall more and more electrical items are being thrown away or left unused, and the precious materials inside them such as gold, aluminium, lithium and copper are lost forever.
The valuable materials contained in any electrical item can easily have a second life through donation, or being recycled into new items with a surprising range of uses, such as wind turbines, life-saving medical devices or even children’s playground equipment and electric vehicles.
