How to Responsibly Dispose of Your Electronics (2025)

Whether you have an aged telephone languishing successful a table drawer oregon a breached laptop gathering particulate successful the backmost of a closet, determination volition ne'er beryllium a amended clip to dispose of it. There’s a bully accidental your unwanted gadget tin instrumentality to utile service, and it whitethorn adjacent marque you a small currency oregon assistance idiosyncratic else. Recycling should beryllium the past resort, but if there’s thing other for your gadget, determination are ways to recycle electronics responsibly.

Global e-waste topped 62 cardinal metric tons successful 2022, according to the United Nations Global E-Waste Monitor, and conscionable 22.3 percent of that discarded was collected and recycled. Too galore aged electronics extremity up successful landfills and hellish e-waste graveyards successful mediocre countries, wherever they poison communities. The occupation is lone increasing worse. The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) forum estimates that 5.3 cardinal phones were dropped retired of usage successful 2022 alone. Governments, companies, and radical are waking up to the information that we indispensable bash better. The large question is, how? Here are immoderate resources, services, and ideas that tin help.

Updated April 2025: We updated the statistic and expanded donation suggestions.

Use Devices for Longer

Before you propulsion distant devices, see utilizing them for a small longer. Do you truly request to upgrade? Perhaps you tin repurpose your aged instrumentality to get much beingness retired of it. For example, you mightiness crook that aged telephone into a webcam. If you are dormant acceptable connected buying for a caller device, probe ethical and eco-friendly electronics. Look for manufacturers and retailers with trade-in and recycling programs.

Consider buying utilized products connected eBay oregon different marketplaces, oregon look for refurbished gadgets. Manufacturers like Apple and Samsung connection refurbished devices astatine a discount, and you tin find loads of refurbished goods astatine Amazon. Elizabeth Chamberlain, manager of sustainability astatine iFixit, recommends Back Market for refurbished phones. For much tips and ideas, we person a usher connected however to bargain utilized oregon refurbished electronics.

Pass Devices On

Passing devices onto household members, friends, and neighbors who tin usage them is the champion mode to compression maximum worth retired of them. “Don’t fto devices hibernate successful a junk drawer oregon closet and discarded away,” says Jeff Seibert, who works astatine SERI (Sustainable Electronics Recycling International). “Get them into idiosyncratic else’s hands who tin usage them arsenic rapidly arsenic imaginable due to the fact that the older devices get, the little affirmative interaction they tin make.”

If you don’t cognize anyone who tin usage your aged electronics, effort the Freecycle Network oregon section Buy Nothing groups connected Facebook to find folks funny successful freebies.

Repair and Refurbish

Whether you program to compression a spot much retired of a device, privation to walk it on to someone, oregon program connected selling it, repairing oregon refurbishing it archetypal is simply a astute move. If you privation to effort and repair a device, iFixit is simply a large spot to start. It boasts much than 90,000 step-by-step repair guides covering phones, tablets, laptops, computers, crippled consoles, and cameras.

YouTube is different large spot to find repair videos, and Chamberlain recommends checking retired repair techs similar Louis Rossmann, Jessa Jones, Ben’s Appliances and Junk, and Rich Rebuilds, but there's nary shortage of repair videos for the circumstantial gadget you're looking for.