Braintree District Council is working with Recycle Your Electricals to encourage local residents to participate in The Great Cable Challenge starting from Monday 14 October 2024.
The nationwide campaign is aimed at tackling the millions of cables sitting idle across UK households.
With over one third of respondents checking for unused electricals less than once a year, the challenge aims to give a second life to the valuable materials contained in cables, such as copper. Copper can be recycled into new items including wind turbines and new tech including mobile phones, laptops, tablets and smart watches.
The Great Cable Challenge comes as new research commissioned by Recycle Your Electricals reveals that two-in-five UK homes hoard their unused electricals and broken tech in a ‘drawer of doom’ within their homes.
Councillor Tom Cunningham, Cabinet Member for Transformation the Environment and Customer Services at Braintree District Council, said: “Recycling electricals has never been easier, and cables represent one of the UK’s biggest e-waste challenges - and one of the biggest copper opportunities as UK households are throwing away or holding onto on average of 23 cables.
“With copper becoming more scarce, demand soaring, and the detrimental environmental and social impacts of mining for raw materials the solution is surprisingly simple which is to harness what we have.”
It is easy to recycle unused cables and electricals by using Recycle Your Electricals’ Recycling Locator. Residents can enter their postcode to find their nearest recycling point which has over 26,000 locations across the UK, and many in the Braintree district including local libraries, Causeway House and Essex Councnty Council’s Recycling Centres.
With millions of cables cluttering up UK homes, Recycle Your Electricals has published a handy Cable Guide, highlighting 35 of the most used cables and providing easy to use visuals to match cables to their original electricals.
If the electricals or the cables are no longer working, or they aren’t needed anymore they can be bagged up and recycled! The Cable Guide can be found here.
Residents can find out the locations that have a small WEEE recycling bin on Braintree District Council’s website: https://www.braintree.gov.uk/bins-waste-recycling/electrical-item-recycling