An electrical recycling firm has hit a milestone with a whopping amount of tech saved from going to landfills.
Hilsea-based Southern Electrical Recycling (SER) Ltd has just surpassed 200 tonnes of electronic waste recycled.
The SER team collected the e-waste from businesses, charities, schools and organisations around the South coast up to as far as London.
Items included electronic tech of all kinds, from kettles to keyboards and everything in between.
The team of four at SER will pick up unwanted, damaged or unused items to bring back to the warehouse and break them down before sorting them into categories of what can be reused and what needs to be recycled.
They send items that they cannot reuse to a third party to be recycled, including parts of electrical items containing plastic or wood.
So far, co-owners David Edwards and Gary Dalton have calculated that they save around eight tonnes from going to landfills every six to eight weeks.
The company has been running for two and a half years.
David hopes that they can increase the amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment – commonly referred to as WEEE – from going to landfills.
He said: ‘50,000 tonnes is a huge amount of waste, especially when you consider that without our help, it could have ended up being thrown away with household waste and ended up in landfill. People don’t often realise that some of the components that make up the technology that we use every day are very toxic, containing materials such as mercury, which has a massively damaging impact on our planet.
‘If we can increase the amount of tonnage that we save then we’ll be doing our jobs. It’s not about what it brings to us as a company but how the earth will look for our future generations. It’s an issue that everyone should be more educated in and care about.’
The UK is the second-biggest producer of e-waste worldwide, with almost 24kg on average produced per person.
Globally, around 54 million tonnes are produced every year, with £7.9bn worth of gold, platinum, and other precious metals lost to landfills.
WEEE is rising three times faster than the world’s population.
