Trash talking and talking trash: musicMagpie reveals the UK’s 2024 'Ultimate E-waste Naughty and Nice List'

Britain is facing an e-waste crisis.

According to the 2024 Global E-waste Monitor Report, a record 62 billion kg of e-waste was generated globally (an average of 7.8 kg per capita). Just 22.3% of this e-waste was documented as formally collected and recycled in an environmentally sound manner.

The problem only gets bigger during the festive season. Research shows that between Black Friday and Christmas alone, people in the UK purchase an estimated 53.5 million electronic items. Shockingly, about 5 million of these end up abandoned, tucked into drawers to gather dust, or worse, in landfill.

To drive accountability, our Christmas campaign utilised The Environment Agency's Waste Data Interrogator’s report to reveal Britain’s 'Ultimate E-waste Naughty and Nice list'. We've analysed data per capita to reveal the UK regions, cities, and towns most responsible for excessive e-waste production and, yes, we’re naming and shaming.

Britain, it’s time to clean up our act.

The UK produced over 300,000 tonnes of e-waste in 2023

In 2023, the UK generated a staggering 318,314 tonnes of e-waste. To put that into perspective, this is roughly the weight of more than 53,000 African elephants or about 26,526 double-decker buses.

This year’s nice list consists of the regions making an effort to keep their e-waste to a minimum. While there’s room for improvement, we can announce that Scotland, Wales, and London ranked as the nicest regions. These regions average out at 210 grams per person, with Scots contributing only 11 grams of e-waste per person. 

1. Scotland: 0.11 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 585 tonnes)
2. Wales: 0.76 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 2,411 tonnes)
3. London: 1.26 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 11,211 tonnes)

This year’s top cities include the country’s capital, with Southend-on-Sea, London, and Sunderland taking first, second, and third place on our nice list. Perhaps surprisingly, Londoners contributed only 809 grams of e-waste per person.

• Southend-on-Sea: 0.77 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 228 tonnes)
• City of London: 0.8 tonnes tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 6113.5 tonnes)
• Sunderland: 1 ton per 1,000 people (total, 341 tonnes) 

We broke this down even further by analysing the e-waste’s recorded towns, so that the UK’s best-behaved towns could have their shining moment. 

• Enfield: 0.004 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 1.5 tonnes)
• Lancing: 0.014 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 0.28 tonnes)
• Chatham: 0.015 tonnes per 1,000 person (total, 1.11 tonnes) 

These towns averaged 34 grams of e-waste per person in 2023. 

Unfortunately, some of the UK’s regions, towns and cities are contributing obscene volumes of e-waste. England’s East Midlands, West Midlands, and North West ranked high, contributing 151,892 tonnes of e-waste between the three areas.

1. East Midlands: 11 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 53,953 tonnes)
2. West Midlands: 7.4 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 44,053 tonnes)
3. North West: 7.2 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 53,886 tonnes)

When we looked into the cities to point a finger at, Exeter, Peterborough, and Canterbury were the top offenders, with the average person in these cities contributing 41 kg of e-waste in 2023. Exonians averaged a whopping 48 kg per person. 

1. Exeter: 48 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 5,666 tonnes)
2. Wakefield: 41 tonnes per 1,000 people (total 3,251 tonnes)
3. Peterborough: 40 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 6,473 tonnes)

When it came to towns, certain areas were particularly sub-par.

In first place was Par (Cornwall), followed by Normanton (Wakefield), and Knottingley (Wakefield). Par’s residents averaged 1.5 tonnes of e-waste per person in 2023. 

1. Par: 1,482 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 2,372 tonnes)
2. Normanton: 371 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 7,742 tonnes)
3. Knottingley: 261 tonnes per 1,000 people (total, 3,531 tonnes)

As part of our campaign, we can also reveal the tech consumers who’ve earned a spot on our Nice List for their commitment to trading in rather than tossing out their devices.

Apple users come out on top, with nearly 70% of our trade-ins coming from iPhone owners. Further behind are Samsung users who make up just over 16% of our trade-ins, showing strong participation in sustainable tech practices. In third place, with around 5% of trade-ins, are Sony users. While this may partly reflect these brands' dominance in the industry, we believe in credit where credit’s due, and these consumers are certainly leading the way in responsible device recycling.

As the festive season approaches, consumers are gearing up for the annual shopping spree, and tech products remain among the most in-demand gifts. However, with 318,314 tonnes of e-waste reported by The Environment Agency's Waste Data Interrogator, it’s crucial to consider how we can responsibly recycle these gifts. 

To help guide you through the process, we’ve analysed the most desired tech gifts from 2023 and compiled the best practices for recycling this holiday season.

E-waste doesn’t just simply disappear once it is discarded and it can cause a lot of problems for the planet. Fortunately, however, our analysis revealed that 95.7%  (304,938 tonnes) of Britain’s e-waste goes to recovery. This recovery process involves extracting valuable materials from the discarded electronics, which helps to conserve resources and reduce the demand for virgin materials.

Despite this, the remaining methods of disposal raise concerns. Incineration, which made up 0.3% of e-waste processing, accounted for 954 tonnes. While it can reduce waste volume, incineration also poses significant risks, including the release of harmful and toxic emissions that harm air quality.

We were pleased to see that landfill disposal only accounted for a minimal 0.2%. However, this still made up 636 tonnes of waste, which could pose serious damage to the UK’s soil and water and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

musicMagpie is the easy way to sell mobile phones and tech, or buy refurbished phones and tech. You’ll make money, save money and help reduce e-waste too!

Methodology

Data for the UK’s 2024 “Ultimate E-waste Naughty and Nice List” and the “fate of e-waste” was taken from The Environment Agency's Waste Data Interrogator’s report, 2023 (© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2024. All rights reserved). Waste was filtered by SOC Sub Category as “Discarded electrical and electronic equipment”. The categorisation of "naughtiness" or "niceness" is based on the quantity of e-waste measured in tonnes.

Tonnes per region were calculated according to “Destination Region”.

Tonnes per city/town were calculated according to “Postcode”.

Data for the “nicest tech consumers” was taken from musicMagpie’s internal data.

Data on 2023’s most popular tech gifts was based on UK Amazon search volumes from keywordtool.io for December of that year.