Published4 minutes ago
Household hoards of unused electricals and broken tech are growing, a recycling campaign group warns.
Material Focus estimates we’ve gone from stockpiling an average of 20 items to 30 within four years.
Its findings come from market research. The top ten products include remote controls, mobile phones and hairdryers.
With the UN reporting that electronic waste is rising five times faster than documented recycling, we’re being urged to clean out our “drawers of doom”.
“I think back in the day my dad would have had a shed full of jars of screws, and the modern dad has a drawer full of 15 old mobiles,” says Paul Bowtell, a self-proclaimed hoarder of electricals.
He counted more than 40 electrical items in just a couple of his storage boxes.
But there’s more, he admits, in the attic, drawers, a footstool and other boxes.
The Bristol dad says there are things he’s looking after for his grown-up sons, and items which were once expensive and now hold no value, so it’s hard to say goodbye.
Scott Butler, executive director of Material Focus, says we’ve probably all got a “drawer of doom”, which has “got cables in there that we don’t know what they’re for: it’s got a DVD remote for a DVD player that we lost a long, long time ago”.
The group – which runs an electricals recycling campaign and postcode search for householders to find drop off points – estimates over 880 million
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