Sainsbury’s to offer mobile-phone charger recycling
September 3, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Sainsbury’s has added another notch to its environmental bow with the introduction of a new recycling scheme for mobile-phone chargers. Throughout August 2010, customers will be able to take their old mobile-phone chargers to any Sainsbury’s store and deposit them to be sent for recycling.
Although mobile-phone recycling has become something of a boom industry in the last few years, phone chargers have been largely forgotten. This is due to the fact that they are more difficult to recycle, and there is also no money involved for recycling an old charger.
As a result, estimates put the figure of unused chargers in the UK at about 20 million – that’s about 5,000 tonnes of waste cluttering up drawers across the nation.
The supermarket is the perfect place to get rid of the old chargers as people have become used to recycling other objects there. Sainsbury’s already has schemes for the recycling of mobile phones and sat navs, so this is yet another positive addition.
It comes as part of the supermarket’s initiative called ‘Make the Difference Days’, and will come to an end on August 28. By this time the supermarket hopes to have collected about 150,000 chargers from both its customers and its employees.
The property director at Sainsbury’s, Neil Sachdev, said that they were hoping to “raise awareness of charger recycling facilities” at the same time as saving about “40 tonnes of waste from going to landfill”.
He highlighted the fact that only 280,000 chargers are currently recycled annually, so if they manage to hit their target of 150,000 they could increase these recycling rates by more than 50%.
This is all very well but what about recycling chargers now? I cannot find anyone willing to consider chargers.
Pity this scheme was so short-lived. have found plenty more to hand in since.
Would like to see this reintroduced. It should be an ongoing solution and not just a one time PR.
I was hoping that I had found a solution, to recycling several chargers, formerly belonging to my 3 children, who no longer live at home. Has this initiative been discontinued, as indicated above? – hopefully not!
I’m still looking for somewhere to take all my chargers. I can’t bring myself to just throw them away
For those who are still looking I found somewhere local to me in Bristol by searching here:
http://www.recyclenow.com/why_recycling_matters/electricals/index.html
Hope that helps 🙂