What happens to your old laptop? The growing problem of e-waste

Monday morning, and a sorry bunch of tangled cables, a broken coffee machine and a single clip-on light is all there is inside the metal crates at Veolia, a noisy recycling depot where residents of the London borough of Southwark drop off broken or unwanted electrical devices. 

But the week has only just started. Already a family is unloading a van packed to the roof: a standing lamp with a floral shade, a microwave, a hairdryer.

The depot is gateway to a countrywide recycling process. The family’s discarded items will either be handed over to charities for repair or shredded into parts and recycled, making their way back into the market as components in new electronic items.

This facility is one of the biggest of its kind in the UK, and it diverts more than 95 per cent of Southwark’s waste — from more than 140,000 homes — away from landfill. Among its load, the plant processes several hundred tonnes of electronic waste — or e-waste — a year. But on a global scale, very little makes it this far.

The Veolia recycling facility in Southwark, London, is one of the biggest facilities in the UK © Leo Goddard