The new research shows the UK’s consumption of small ‘fasttech’ electrcals is becoming an issue set to outstrip ‘fast fashion’, in terms of the amount sent to landfill.

This is according to a new study conducted by Material Focus as part of the Recycle Your Electricals campaign to mark International E-Waste Day taking place on 14 October.

‘Fasttech’ refers to everyday small electrical items, from headphones to cables, decorative lights to mini fans and even single-use vapes.

These items often have a short lifespan and cost, on average, £4. This means they may be seen as ‘disposable’ (47% of us don’t expect cheaper electricals to last long), even when they’re not designed to be.

The emerging issue is just the tip of the e-waste iceberg, however, with the valuable materials contained inside these items – gold, aluminium, and lithium – lost forever when thrown away. These materials are some of the world’s most valuable as they enable the function of semiconductors and microchips which power every facet of our electronics – importantly, they are finite materials that the Earth will eventually run out of.

Material Focus found that over half a billion FastTech items were purchased in the last year alone – equal to one every sixteen seconds.

Nearly half a billion of these (471m) end up in landfill per annum including: 260 million disposable vapes, 26 million cables (enough to go round the earth five times), 29 million LED, solar and decorative lights, 9.8 million USB sticks, 4.8 million mini fans and more.

Every year in the UK, the average adult buys nine FastTech items and throws away eight (90% thrown away), buying FastTech for a wide range of reasons from replacing a broken item (39% of UK adults) or as a fun novelty (8%).

Some of the most likely items of FastTech to be finned include mini speakers, handheld vacuum cleaners and step counters.

With annual spend on FastTech passing the £2.8 billion mark for reportedly the first time in 2023, Material Focus is sharing a timely reminder that anything with a plug, battery, or cable can be recycled.

Scott Butler, Executive Director, Material Focus, which runs the Recycle Your Electricals campaign, says, “FastTech is seriously rivalling Fast Fashion, and is causing similar headaches. People should think carefully about buying some of the more frivolous FastTech items in the first place. But as FastTech items are quite cheap and small, people may not realise that they contain valuable materials and will just pop them in the bin, meaning we lose everything inside them instead of recycling them into something new.”

Although the total number of electrical items thrown away has decreased since 2017 (103 thousand tonnes of electricals are thrown away every year, down 34% partly due to lighter weight items) and more and more people are recycling (60% of people say they regularly recycle their electricals, up from 52% in 2021).

Recommended reading

• How the Tech Industry Can Tackle the E-waste Crisis Head on
• How Much E-waste is Generated in the UK?
• New Study: A Third of Scots Don’t Know How to Recycle E-waste

However, a staggering 880 million household electricals are lying unused in UK homes – that’s a 67% increase compared to then research was last conducted three years ago. The average household now has 30 items gathering dust.

“We want to get the message across that anything with a plug, battery or cable can be recycled and there’s somewhere near you to do it,” Butler said. “The scale of the issue is huge, but there’s an easy solution – just as the trend for recycling and repurposing fashion has grown and grown, we want to encourage the nation to recycle FastTech, guilt and fuss-free.”

Any UK resident can find their nearest tech recycling point using a Recycling Locator which has over 16,000 recycling points.