Why does Material Focus support International E-Waste Day?
Material Focus, through its Recycle Your Electricals campaign, supports International E-Waste Day to help tackle the growing challenges of electronic waste. Our goal? To encourage people to fix, donate, sell, reuse, and recycle their unused electrical items. By spreading the word, we’re helping reduce pollution, prevent battery fires, and promote a circular economy by recovering valuable materials from discarded devices.
Why is this year’s campaign focusing on idle cables?
This year’s campaign, “The Great Cable Challenge,” is all about tackling idle cables – one of the most common but overlooked types of e-waste in homes. Every UK household has that “drawer of doom,” overflowing with forgotten cables. These cables often contain valuable materials, like the hidden treasure of copper, yet they sit unused. By encouraging people to clear out these old cables and other unwanted electricals, we’re promoting a simple action everyone can take to fight e-waste.
How will the goal of recycling one million cables be tracked?
We’re aiming to recycle one million cables, and we’ll track our progress by collecting data from our partners and drop-off points involved in the campaign. By collaborating with local authorities, schools, offices, retailers, waste management companies and recyclers, we’ll monitor the number of cables collected. We’ll also use digital engagement metrics and participation rates from events to measure our impact and drive more recycling efforts.
What is the biggest obstacle to getting people to recycle their cables?
The biggest obstacles are awareness and convenience. Many people simply don’t know that cables can be recycled or where to recycle them. Plus, if recycling isn’t easy or feels like too much hassle, people won’t bother. To overcome this, we need to boost public awareness and make recycling as accessible as possible. By searching “Recycle Your Electricals,” people can quickly find one of the 26,000 drop-off points—making it easier than they think to recycle.
How has the HypnoCat TV advert boosted the Recycle Your Electricals campaign?
The HypnoCat TV advert has been a game-changer for the Recycle Your Electricals campaign. By using humour and a memorable character, we’ve grabbed public attention and made e-waste a topic that’s approachable and unforgettable. HypnoCat captures viewers’ imaginations and gets them thinking about their forgotten electricals, like cables, in their homes. And with stories on things like battery fires, vapes and drawers of doom we’ve increased mainstream media coverage on e-waste from 1,500 stories in 2019 to over 12,000 in 2023, keeping the conversation about recycling electricals front and centre.
Our strategy is working – In 2023 we see that 44% of the UK population are aware of the Recycle Your Electricals campaign, 1 million new users visited our postcode locator tool and 7,000 more tonnes of small electricals were recycled than in 2022. Based on an estimated 2,000 items in one tonne of small mixed waste electricals that is 14 million more small electricals.
Want to join The Great Cable Challenge? If you’re a local authority, retailer, community group, charity or individual who would like to help take one small action to make a big difference contact hello@materialfocus.org.uk to find out more information.
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