“SHOCKING: You won’t believe what happens to our old technology in Disposable Britain!”

Approximately every year 30,000 tons of e-waste is being illegally shipped out of Great Britain. Much goes to developing countries to be smelted by underpaid workers in highly dangerous conditions or to leach toxic substances from landfills.

Another esteemed 87,000 tons they are either dumped or funneled into illegal landfills around England.

Yet every retailer, local council and recycling company insists they are doing the right thing with the old technology we entrust to them. So how exactly do our unwanted laptops, monitors and TVs disappear into the murky underworld that is the informal trade in waste?

The Financial Times decided to find out. We put the trackers into broken old FT laptops with no data and delivered them to six major UK retailers, who are legally required to take back old products from customers who buy new ones.

Over the next six months, the trackers took us on a curious tour of Britain, with stops at a Norfolk beach, two residential addresses in Slough and a warehouse in rural Wales.

They have opened a window onto an industry plagued by an Achilles heel it calls “leakage” – where goods slip through the fingers of formal recyclers into the hands of other, potentially questionable, actors.

All the retailers promised they would “recycle” the laptops, but one of the two we gave to John Lewis was stolen from the recycling supply chain twice. In the meantime, Argos has sold the two we handed over to an eBay seller.

None of the laptops we’ve been keeping an eye on ended up being exported illegally, but some have slipped into flows that may still be headed in that direction.

The UK’s Environment Agency told the FT in response to a Freedom of Information request that there were a number of ways old technology could find its way onto ships destined for illegal export. Charity shops can provide donated electronics to textile exporters along with unsaleable clothing, or operators of “small industrial units” can send waste to “West African nations,” the agency said.

It added another possible route when electronic devices returned by customers to resellers as “reasonably suspected to be defective or damaged and therefore waste” are “auctioned in bulk” by the resellers themselves or by the companies that buy from them.

Data obtained via the FoI request suggests that the Environment Agency is ill-equipped to stop such flows, with law enforcement having plummeted in recent years.

A senior official with the agency’s illegal waste export team said they were a “relatively small team for the scale of the problem” and they were “pumping it up”. The official said the criminals are targeting ports they believe the agency does not inspect regularly.

Rubbish thieves

Six months after implementing the 14 FT laptops, 10 appeared to have been recycled successfully.

Three distributed with Amazon, two with Dell, one with Curry’s and one with John Lewis went to authorized recycling facilities. The recycling company that received the three laptops we gave to Apple said they were recycled.

Curry’s second laptop was still at a recycling company’s site being collected for repairs, the retailer said.

Then the tracker went black, meaning it’s not clear where the laptop went next.

“The fact that it happened twice might just be unfortunate,” Sayers noted, “or it reaffirms the fact that things are leaking.”

Justin Greenaway, commercial director of Sweeep Kuusakoski, an electronics recycling facility in Kent, said household waste recycling centers are regularly targeted by criminals and ‘if e-waste is stolen, it’s often destined for export”.

Slough Borough Council, which runs the recycling centre, said the trackers range of accuracy meant the laptop could not be proven to have entered its site, but “if anyone wanted to lift something. . . it could happen without being noticed.”

WasteCare insisted that theft from its operations was “rare”, minimized by CCTV and 24/7 on-site cameras in its vehicles, and said it was working “to put additional measures are in place to avoid a recurrence.” John Lewis said the company was reviewing its processes to prevent this from happening again.

Every year, around 114,000 tonnes of electronics are lost from the UK’s recycling system due to theft, according to a report by Material Focus, a non-profit electrical recycling organization.

Five of 39 broken computers, monitors and printers the US campaign group broke Basel Action Network left in recycling centers in the UK in 2017 it ended up being exported to developing countries. It is almost always illegal to export broken electronics from the UK and Europe, and BAN found the UK had the worst export rate of 10 European countries tested.

The export of fully functional electronic devices is allowed, but many goods that exporters claim are not, and waste streams from importing countries, such as Ghana, Nigeria and Pakistan, often lack the capacity to recycle them. Workers on small-scale processing sites are exposed to harmful substances when they burn plastic to gain access to copper and other metals.

BAN reported in a studio that an adult who eats an egg laid by hens in Agbogbloshie slum in Ghana, famous for the informal processing of European electronic waste, would exceed the limits of the European Food Safety Authority by 220 times for a particularly toxic substance.

British MPs found in a 2020 investigation that the Environment Agency was not actually cracking down on illegal exports of e-waste. According to FoI data obtained by the FT, the number of port inspections in England for suspected illegal exports of e-waste has decreased nearly every year since 2016, from 172 to 33 last year.

The agency served just 14 advisories to prevent suspected illegal exports of e-waste last year, down from 50 in 2016, and there have been no prosecutions since 2017. The numbers are part of a broader downward trend in enforcement against illegal shipments of all types of waste.

The Environment Agency said: “Companies must ensure that electrical waste is transported to and treated by the appropriate recycling centres, in line with their duty of care responsibilities, and those who fail to comply can be prosecuted.”

Dealer transparency

A manager working for the eBay seller confirmed that they buy returns from several retailers, including Argos, to repair and then resell.

Argos’ website has not indicated that it resells the goods, only stating that the items will be “recycled”. Argos, which is owned by Sainsbury’s, changed the wording after the FT contacted it and said: “To help both our customers and the planet, we offer a collection service. . . In line with government-recommended waste hierarchy, every product will be safely recycled, refurbished or resold.”

Scott Butler, executive director of Material Focus, said keeping products going longer is a good thing, “but if retailers say something is going to be recycled, then it should be recycled.”

The owner’s LinkedIn page lists large quantities of TVs, laptops and desktop computers, some for “export”.

Experts who reviewed the posts suggested the items may be too poorly packaged to be reused overseas, so they may not all be functional.

Tes-Amm told the FT that he had been recycling the laptops and discovering the trackers. He claimed he accidentally added the trackers to a pallet of working goods he was selling to the exporter, but the exporter returned them.

The exporter confirmed Tes-Amm’s account and said their website was “out of date” and that although they have a license to recycle IT, “we prefer to stick to just buying and selling” .

They added, “We don’t export laptops to any country.” But comments under some of the LinkedIn posts advertising laptops show that they send out price lists and inventory to customers based in India, Pakistan and Taiwan. The exporter did not reply to any further questions.

Regarding his relationship with the exporter, Tes-Amm said, “There are a number of functional equipment brokers eager to purchase our production. . . For us, they are an infrequent buyer of refurbished equipment.”

On average, every person in the UK has fathered 24 kg of e-waste in 2019.

“The latest mobile phones come out every year, we take a new one and throw the old one away,” said the clerk of the eBay seller who buys from Argos.

It is widely believed that achieving a fully circular economy is the country’s only hope of fueling its consumption habits, while also successfully tackling climate change. But at the moment, the leak is one of the main reasons which is still a long way off.

“The environment is crashing faster than we can keep up with it,” the eBay seller added. “We are disposable Britain.”

Maps by Steven Bernard