The battle for small electrical recycling

By Brian Clegg

For years now I have occasionally troubled my local council (Swindon) with emails about a failure in their recycling collections. At the moment the council collects, for example, plastic to recycle and/or burn. Which is fine – we don’t particularly want it in landfill – but it is neither an important natural resource nor does it have any value to speak of. However, the council doesn’t collect small electrical items. 

Up to now I’ve had zero useful response to my emails. Our previous Conservative-led council ignored my emails to the council lead on waste, while my local councillor simply said ‘We don’t do that, people can take small electricals to the recycling centre, and some supermarkets have bins for batteries.’ If you have a single battery, a phone cable, a charger or whatever, none of which should go into the landfill bin, you are expected to book an appointment and drive (in my case) a ten mile round trip to the recycling centre. That’s great for climate change, guys. And then there’s the battery recycling bin at my supermarket. It is a) always overflowing and b) doesn’t take bigger (much more valuable) batteries like old laptop batteries.

Out of interest, I emailed our new local councillor, who is Labour. He replied saying it was an interesting idea, and could I identify another council doing this. As it happens, an adjacent council (Vale of the White Horse) does collect small electricals. Huge pat on the back to Vale of the White Horse. I was told the councillor will pass on the suggestion and let me know the outcome. We shall have to see if I get any further response or if the suggestion was filed in the (recycling) bin.

Surely, this is a no-brainer? Lithium ion batteries contain crucial materials for everything from smartphones to electric cars, yet at the moment they are mostly sent to landfill. Bizarrely, those horrible single-use vapes, which can’t be recharged, almost all contain rechargeable lithium batteries. Not only is this wasting an important raw material, they tend to catch fire under stress and have already caused several fires in bin collections and landfill sites.

A council has to be realistic about recycling and make it easy to do if they want to make it work. No one is going to take a phone cable, an AA battery or even a toaster (which these days contain electronics) to a recycling centre. They will sigh and dump them in the landfill bin. And you can’t blame them. It’s time every council collected small electrical waste. You know it makes sense.

This has been a Green Heretic production. See all my Green Heretic articles here.

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.