Recycle your Electricals, a campaign I mentioned before here, has just launched Give Back January.

The statistics they’ve published are complete mind-blowing.

‘Every year between Black Friday and Christmas the UK buys a massive 53.5 million electrical items.’ 😧😧😧

‘That includes a whopping 7 million blenders for our New Year’s health kicks’

Recycle Your Electricals are encouraging people to donate their stuff, sell them or recycle them. Another option, obviously, is not to buy so many devices in the first place, not only because they need ‘recycling’ at some point but also because the more electric items in your house, the higher your electricity consumption.

Find out more about Give back January.

If you have a tablet, laptop, smartphone or other computer accessories gathering dust in your house, you can donate them to several organisations based in London.

The Restart Project has listed some of them on their website here.

Little Lives UK, a children’s charity, is also accepting donations. They collect a wide variety of electronic items and they collect for FREE in the London area. Click here for more details.

Little Lives UK have excellent reviews on their website. This charity has a reputation of offering an excellent service to anyone who wants to do an electronic clear-out - whether out of generosity or not.

Also, Hubbub is still running Community  Calling, ‘a donation project that sees old smartphones be data-wiped, cleaned and gifted with free credit to owners who otherwise wouldn’t have internet access’.

They claim to have given access to 2500 people to the Internet since they launched the campaign last year. Their aim is to support 10 000 digitally excluded households.

‘Buying used goods is trendier than ever, and the capital’s retailers are responding’, Klaus Sieg writes for Reasons to Be Cheerful.

‘A survey of nearly 7,000 people in Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain, published Tuesday by Euroconsumers, a cluster of consumer organisations, found the number of people who said they threw away almost no food doubled to 70% during lockdown’, Thin Lei Win reports for Thomson Reuters Foundation.

‘In 2017, (…), I decided not to buy any more new laptops. Instead, I switched to a 2006 second-hand machine that I purchased online for 50 euros and which does everything that I want and need. Including a new battery and a simple hardware upgrade, I invested less than 150 euros’, independent journalist Kris de Decker shares his experience using second-hand laptops and saving lots of money in the process.

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