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There have been quite a few articles talking about the UK’s poor performance when it comes to WEEE or recycling our electronic waste, it’s very disappointing to see. There remains a few things that need improved, it needs to be made easier to recycle your products – an old argument I know, but let me give you my example. I have old headphones for my iPod. The left ear doesn’t work. Where do I recycle them? There’s nothing on the Apple site specifically about headphones, and the recycling sites mention nothing?

Have we thought of using councils and enterprise adopting a more direct approach – anything electrical, whether it’s your cooker, your radio, headphones or the seven Nokia chargers you have, send them to us or we’ll collect them and dispose of them. The thing is a lot of the equipment might be re-used or re-deployed where appropriate, but would we not be better recycling it anyway in terms of energy efficiency? Could we offer a trade in scheme for televisions, for mobile phones, printers and computers? £10 off for every device you trade in when buying a new device? Just you watch how many early Pentium to Pentium 4′s suddenly get swapped for that new dual or quad core pc. It’s £300 you say, there’s two mobile phones a LaserJet III and a Pentium 133, how much is it now?

• We need end users to buy-in to recycling and using more energy efficient products
• We need vendors to make it easier to recycle devices – no barriers to entry and the packaging used
• We need government/local government to make it easier to recycle everything and discourage non-recyclable packaging where appropriate – what about all those coffee cups that we can’t recycle is there really no alternative?

We need to remove the excuses for inactivity, make googling and recycling that bit easier – we also need to stop those practices where a recycling batch is binned because ‘it’s contaminated’, glass in the plastic bottle back, yes it’s irritating, we need to ensure proper labelling and information. Can we also at the same time make supermarkets, producers and service providers use easier to recycle packaging, reduce their packaging and switch away from those smaller packages for typical household products – would it not be better for everyone if my washing powder was sold by 8kg packs than 1kg? Do we not create far more packaging, energy footprint and everything else by selling more smaller packs?

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