East Midlands could save over £1.3 billion by extending device lifespans

This Recycling Week, Asurion Europe is sharing how much consumers in the East Midlands could be saving by holding on to devices for an additional year and remembering to trade them in.

The theme of the UK’s twentieth Recycle Week – The Big Recycling Hunt – is “missed capture”, the items that can be recycled but are commonly missed in the home. The vast range of products with electrical or electronic components that are now present in our households are often not properly recycled at end of life. In fact, the UK has missed targets for the collection of household waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) for six years, though we are currently on track to meet 2023 targets.[i] It is crucial to maintain this momentum.

A range of factors are holding customers back from extending device life, including the cost or inconvenience of repair, a lack of awareness of how to dispose of e-waste responsibly, or simply the desire to stay up to date with the latest product models. With e-waste one of the fastest growing waste streams globally and the UK generating the second-highest amount of e-waste per person[ii], convenient and effective solutions for device repair and disposal are crucial.

Sustainable solutions often generate both environmental and cost savings. In fact, Asurion Europe’s study found that each UK customer could be saving over £400 on average by investing in tech cover and extending the life of smartphones, tablets or laptops by a year – and trading in at the end of that year. In the East Midlands region, this equates to savings of over £1.3 billion. For comparison, the Government has allocated £1.8 billion to boost energy efficiency and cut emissions of homes and public buildings – and this is for all of England.[iii]

Additionally, extending lifetime by a year reduces the carbon footprint of manufacturing replacement devices by an average 99 kilos CO2­e per person, which scales up to 327,723 tonnes CO2e across the East Midlands. This is equivalent to CO2 emissions from powering around 41,000 homes for one year.[iv]

Gavin Miller, CEO, Asurion Europe comments, “Given our reliance on technology and our extensive use of digital products, we need to be savvier as a society about how to responsibly replace or dispose of devices. Tech protection can comprehensively cover device maintenance, installation, optimisation, repair and trade-in options – saving customers a neat sum while reducing environmental footprint. This is especially helpful in the current economic circumstances, as we all aim to make our money go further.”

The full report, including a breakdown of financial and environmental savings across UK regions, can be downloaded here: https://tradein.asurion.co.uk/ewastereport.