Throwaway Britain: What Happens To Our Old Tech?

An anonymous reader shares a report: 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. 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 somethingâ...âit 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.

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