Electrical recycling firm reaches 200 tonnes of e-waste

AN electrical recycling firm has hit a milestone with a whopping amount of tech being saved from going to landfill.

Hilsea-based Southern Electrical Recycling (SER) Ltd has just surpassed a total of 200 tonnes of electronic waste recycled.

The e-waste collected by the SER team 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 down, before sorting into categories of what can be reused and what needs to be recycled.

They send items that they are unable to reuse to a third party to be recycled, including parts of electrical items that contain plastic or wood.

So far, co-owners David Edwards and Gary Dalton have calculated that they save around eight tonnes from going to landfill 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 landfill.

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 is very toxic, containing materials such as mercury, so has a massively damaging impact to 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 around the world, 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 landfill.

WEEE is rising three times faster than the world’s population.

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