I always take my WEEE to the local dump, and they always tell me to toss it in with the scrap metal.

For years most people have had some sort of recycling collection for organic/paper etc.

Why not have some sort of blue box collection where you can dump all your old electrical stuff and gadgets. Collected every couple of weeks.

A tempting excuse for councils to increase their bin tax though

Of course they don't know how much goes in landfill.

My mobile dies. I pull the sim, buy a replacement mob. cheap on ebay, and then?

1. Responsibly take the old mobe down to the recycling

2. Throw it in a drawer and forget it.

3. Throw it in the bin.

4. Sell it on ebay for spares.

5. Give it to a charity that refurbishes them for 3rd world.

If I do 1. the gov. has, after a fashion, an idea of what has happened. The others? No records.

Wee fails because most people won't be bothered for small gadgets.

The icon? All my jokes are recycled.

The government should be paying us to collect recycling trash! Effectively we're providing them with raw materials.

It might help if appropriate boxes or whatever could be made available to collect dead CFLs. Although these contain only milligrams of mercury, there are an awful lot of them about these days.

The (tens? hundreds?) of millions of traditional fluorescent tubes that illuminate office buildings around the world also contain mercury. Strange that no one is concerned about them, it's only the CFLs that are so toxic and dangerous we should go back to using incandescents for everything.

@ David Kelly

Couldn't agree more. It seems the Gov't (both and local) are so determined to screw us for the 'privilege' of recycling our waste that they are actually encouraging fly tipping.

Not WEEE related, but went to our local waste facility with a car-load of old plasterboard. Expected them to merely point out which skip to tip in into. Instead they screwed me £15 for the privilege.

Guess what. Next time it's all going into plastic sacks and into the "General waste" skip (and thence into landfill). What they can't see me dump, they can't charge me for.

Okay, lets get down to the nuts and bolts of WEEE recycling. Bulbs, lamps and flourescent tubes have about 12 pence added per unit to the shop price to off-set the cost of recycling them. Computers etc look to have fallen out of this. If you think that the Government makes cash out of charging you for disposal of WEEE, think again!. The costs involved in recycling the goods are pretty much prohibitive. Computer screens and some other plastic components contain flame retardants- YES they still do- even now!!!!!. As for processing it, if you want everything shredding, we can cut costs, but expect raw material prices to rise again- even further than they were before, as we can't extract/ segregate the particulate that is generated from shredding. The most efficient method of extracting resources from waste WEEE is by manual processing into circuit boards, different types of plastics, metals (ferrous and non-ferrous, cables, liquids and glass. On top of this, hazardous components have to be treated, mercury powders, lead etc extracted and specially disposed of, all before the raw (safe) materials can be re-used

As for making money from raw resources. Scrap metal is now £30 per tonne, gold is dropping sub $750 per troy ounce. Plastics is so low that recycling your household waste is completely uneconomical. Even at their peak, resource prices were only just keeping most recyclers afloat. The fees/ costs cover the logistics of collecting materials, notifying the environment agency- that's £10 per collection, paying staff, overheads and the dreaded licenses from the Environment Agency.

Of course, simply dumping it in landfill is fine, but please remember, there are 2 types of landfill- lined with clay and unlined. Yours will be unlined as your local authority does not expect you to be dumping hazardous waste. This, unlike a lined landfill site, will permeate/ leech all the hazaroud lead, mercury, phosphor, cadmium and other horrid materials into the ground water. Now if everyone does what you plan on doing, you council tax will rise at the very least and local populace poisoned at the very worst.

An alternative is a free recycling service, but please remember that you can't hold anyone responsible for what they do with your waste or how they generate money from it.