Who can recycle my PC?

Hello all, long time listener first time caller, all that.

This isn’t Fairphone related at all, but this seems like an appropriate place to ask. I hope staff or forum members will have some ideas.

I’m going to replace my tower PC within the next six months or so. My current one is totally obsolete, I’ve kept it going as long as I can but it’s now very definitely last decade’s technology. There are no parts in it that I can sell: it’s scrap, apart from the DVD drive and hard drive that I will keep.

Those scrap parts must contain a lot of the useful minerals mentioned in the Fairphone story though.

Is there an organisation that can recycle my PC? I’d hate for it to go into landfill, or for it to be picked apart by slave children somewhere in Asia, but I’d be very happy if it could be reclaimed and recycled into a FairPhone or similar item by properly paid workers.

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What country are you in?

I’m in South East England.

Ah excellent, I’m in the UK too, so right into my expertise :smiley:

All councils in England are required to collect old electronic equipment under the EU WEEE directive, you can check your council website for details about what they do with them, if they publish.

Alternatively, you can check the Which website or Recycle-now website for tips and I’m also aware of this site which list a number of organisations that refurb/reuse for various purposes such as charities

Hopefully these give you some ideas. I have used freegle to offer out items to other people locally

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That’s great, thanks. I know there’s an “electronics” box at the local tip of course, but I wonder how well local councils are really able to deal with what’s quite a technical challenge. I’ll take a look at those links.

Where I used to live there was a company that collected old laptops and refurbished them for use in schools, that seemed like an excellent idea to me - my old desktop machine is certainly up to school-level IT lessons but not much more than that.

Isn’t there someone who might still be interested in the hardware? A local school or club or something? The local library perhaps? Recycling is all fine of course, but if you can make someone else happy with it, then I guess that would be even better!

I put things into eBay. Just sold a broken printer for spare parts and an old screen. This way, you can ensure someone else keeps using the old stuff, which reduces overall waste and pollution. If the expected price for the item is very low, I always put the items up for pick up only. I only get a few coins then, but do not need to package and spent time to get it to the post office.