Throwaway Britain: what happens to our old tech?
Every year about 30,000 tonnes of electronic waste is illegally shipped out of Britain. Much is destined for developing countries to be smelted down by underpaid workers in highly unsafe conditions or leach toxic substances from dumpsites.
Another estimated 87,000 tonnes are fly-tipped or funnelled into illegal waste sites around England.
Yet every retailer, local council and recycling company insists it is doing the right thing with the old tech we entrust to them. So how exactly do our unwanted laptops, monitors and TVs disappear into the murky netherworld that is the informal waste trade?
The Financial Times decided to find out. We fitted trackers in old, broken FT laptops — cleared of data — and gave them to the UK’s six most prominent retailers, who are legally obliged to take back old goods from customers buying new ones.
Over the next six months, the trackers took us on a curious tour of Britain, with stops at a Norfolk beach, two residential addresses in Slough and a warehouse in rural Wales.
They opened a window into an industry plagued by an Achilles heel it calls “leakage” — where goods slip through the fingers of formal recyclers into the hands of other, potentially questionable, actors.
All the retailers promised they would “recycle” the laptops, but one of the two we gave to John Lewis was stolen twice out of the recycling supply chain. Meanwhile, Argos sold the two we handed in to an eBay seller.
None of the laptops we kept sight of ended up illegally exported, but some slipped into streams that could still head that way.
The UK’s Environment Agency told the FT in response to a freedom of information request that there were multiple ways old tech could find its way on to ships bound for illegal export. Charity shops may give donated electronics to textile exporters alongside unsellable clothes, or operators from “small industrial units” may send waste to “West African nations”, the agency said.
It added another possible route is when electronics returned by customers to retailers as “reasonably suspected to be faulty or damaged and thus waste” are “auctioned off in bulk” by either the retailers themselves or companies buying from them.
Data obtained via the FoI request suggests the Environment Agency is ill-equipped to stop such flows, with enforcement actions having plummeted in recent years.
A senior officer on the agency’s illegal waste exports team said it was a “relatively small team for the scale of the issue” and they were “firefighting”. The officer said criminals target ports they believe the agency does not regularly inspect.
Waste pilferers
Six months after deploying the 14 FT laptops, 10 appeared to have been recycled correctly.
Three deployed with Amazon, two with Dell, one with Curry’s and one with John Lewis travelled to authorised recycling plants. The recycling company that received the three laptops we gave to Apple said they were recycled.
The second Curry’s laptop was still sitting at the site of a recycling company to be harvested for repairs, the retailer said.
Then the tracker went dark, meaning it is unclear where the laptop went next.
“The fact it happened twice might just be unfortunate,” noted Sayers, “or it reiterates the fact that stuff leaks.”
Justin Greenaway, commercial manager at Sweeep Kuusakoski, an electronics recycling plant in Kent, said household waste recycling centres were regularly targeted by criminals and “if e-waste is stolen it is often destined to be exported”.
Slough Borough Council, which runs the recycling centre, said the accuracy radius of trackers meant it could not be proved the laptop entered its site, but “if someone wanted to lift something . . . it could happen without being noticed”.
WasteCare insisted that theft from its operations was “rare”, minimised by 24/7 on-site CCTV and cameras in its vehicles, and said it was working “to put in place additional measures to avoid a recurrence”. John Lewis said the company was reviewing its processes to prevent this from happening again.
Approximately 114,000 tonnes of electronics are lost from the UK’s recycling system to theft every year, according to a report by Material Focus, a non-profit electrical recycling organisation.
Five of 39 broken computers, monitors and printers that the US campaign group Basel Action Network left at recycling centres around the UK in 2017 ended up being exported to developing countries. It is almost always illegal to export broken electronics from the UK and Europe, and BAN found that the UK had the worst export rate of 10 European countries tested.
Exporting fully working electronics is allowed, but many goods that exporters claim are functioning are not, and the importing countries’ waste streams, such as Ghana, Nigeria and Pakistan, often lack the capacity to recycle them. Workers in small-scale processing yards are exposed to harmful substances when burning the plastics to access copper and other metals.
BAN reported in a study that an adult eating an egg laid by hens in the Agbogbloshie slum in Ghana, famous for informally processing Europe’s electronic waste, would exceed the European Food Safety Authority limits of one particularly toxic substance by 220 times.
British MPs found in a 2020 inquiry that the Environment Agency was not effectively clamping down on illegal electronic waste exports. According to FoI data obtained by the FT, the number of port inspections in England for suspected illegal electronic waste exports has fallen almost every year since 2016, from 172 to 33 last year.
The agency only served 14 notices to prevent suspected illegal electronic waste exports last year, down from 50 in 2016, and there have been no prosecutions since 2017. The numbers are part of a wider downward trend in enforcement against illegal shipments of all types of waste.
The Environment Agency said: “Businesses must ensure electrical waste is transported and treated by the appropriate recycling centres, in line with their duty of care responsibilities, and those found failing to comply can face prosecution.”
Retailer transparency
A manager working for the eBay seller confirmed they buy returns from several retailers including Argos to repair and then resell them.
Argos’s website did not indicate it resells the goods, stating only that the items will be “recycled”. Argos, which is owned by Sainsbury’s, amended the wording after the FT contacted it and said: “To help both our customers and the planet, we offer a takeback service . . . In line with the government advised waste hierarchy, each product will be safely recycled, refurbished or resold.”
Scott Butler, executive director of Material Focus, said keeping products working for longer was a good thing, “but if retailers say something is going to be recycled, then it should be recycled”.
The owner’s LinkedIn page lists bulk quantities of TVs, laptops and desktop computers, some for “export”.
Experts who looked at the posts suggested the items may be too poorly packaged to be intended for reuse abroad, so may not all be functioning.
Tes-Amm told the FT it had recycled the laptops and discovered the trackers. It said it accidentally added the trackers to a pallet of functioning goods it was selling to the exporter but that the exporter returned them.
The exporter confirmed Tes-Amm’s account and said their website was “not up to date” and that although they had a licence to recycle IT, “we prefer to stick with buying and selling only”.
They added: “We do not export laptops to any country.” But comments under some of the LinkedIn posts advertising laptops show them sending price and stock lists to customers based in India, Pakistan and Taiwan. The exporter did not respond to further questions.
About its relationship with the exporter, Tes-Amm said: “There are numerous brokers of functional equipment that are eager to buy our output . . . To us, they are an infrequent buyer of refurbished equipment.”
On average, every person in the UK generated 24kg of electronic waste in 2019.
“The latest mobile phones come out every year, we get a new one and throw away the old one,” said the employee of the eBay seller who buys from Argos.
It is widely agreed that achieving a fully circular economy is the country’s only hope of feeding its consumption habit while also successfully tackling climate change. But at the moment, leakage is one of the key reasons that is still a long way off.
“The environment is crashing quicker than we can keep up with it,” the eBay seller added. “We’re throwaway Britain.”
Maps by Steven Bernard