Maxey Moverley recently became one of the first users of the Royal Mint’s recycling facility. We have started using the Royal Mint recycling service for all of our waste electronics that can no longer be used for repairs. Here’s our take on the service and how this scheme can help cut waste in your business.
What is WEEE Recycling?
WEEE, or Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, includes most products that have a plug or need a battery. What you do with these items when they’re no longer of use matters.
In many cases, the wires and connections in your broken printer, for example, are still usable. Sending the whole thing to landfill means those parts will never be used again, and new copper and precious metals will be needed for new equipment.
According to HSE, UK householders and companies discard an estimated 2 million tonnes of WEEE items every year, and this figure is only set to rise.
Just as plastics, glass, tin and cardboard can be recycled into new products, WEEE recycling means that we can reuse viable parts from old equipment in repairs, or extract the precious metals to create something altogether new.
What is the Royal Mint doing?
The Royal Mint recently launched their precious metals recovery programme, extracting gold from waste circuit boards and silver from archival medical x-ray film. The processing is done in the UK, shortening transport routes to reduce carbon emissions, and the recovered metals are used to produce sustainable jewellery.
866 launched with a 28-piece gender-neutral jewellery collection that celebrates reusing precious metals that would otherwise be wasted, rather than mining new materials around the world.
Why Maxey Moverley got involved
As part of our commitment to creating a circular economy, we became one of the first companies to adopt the Royal Mint metal recovery programme into our waste management policy.
We now send waste printed circuit boards to be processed, so that the gold used in old circuits can become new, beautiful jewellery.
Our waste is generated as a by-product of repairs and from customers sending us their WEEE waste. Having an innovative recycling project like this to contribute to is a sustainable way to make this gold go further.
Impact
In addition to electronics repair, Maxey Moverley takes a circular economy approach to waste. This is an environmentally conscious systems approach which minimises use of new, finite materials and waste creation, in favour of reuse, recycling and better design. When a unit cannot be repaired, we screen carefully for components that can be re-used in other repairs, such as wires, fans, sensors and more.
In the same vein, where we can’t re-use the gold in printed circuit boards directly, we have found a company that can. Working together with other service providers is what makes this an economy of material circulation, rather than a linear supply chain.
The direct carbon saving of this contribution is this: the CO2 emissions from mining, processing and delivering gold to jewellery manufacturers would be much greater than the emissions of delivering and processing circuit boards to create the same jewellery. This is a huge reduction in potential emissions, of which we’re proud to be a part.
How to Get Involved
Your business can become more sustainable by considering how you handle broken and unusable electronics. Most electronics break down due to one faulty part, while the rest is still completely functional. Buying new equipment can be expensive, but also validates the CO2 emissions attached to its production.
By sending machines to an electronic repair centre, you avoid wasting usable electronic parts and paying for brand-new equipment. The faulty part is replaced and recycled, and the repaired machine is returned to you, saving money and contributing to a carbon-neutral economy.
Read More: Carbon Neutral Electronic Repair