Hair dryer today, gone tomorrow! A Christmas recycling tip…

Which hot gadgets will Santa bring you this year? Hair straighteners? Espresso machine? Digital camera? This Christmas a gigantic 25% of us were planning to buy small electronic goods for each other, so you’re definitely not alone. But what about the old electricals you already own? Clare Saxon has a plan for those, and it’s good for the environment.

Research carried out by Recycle Now shows that an even more gigantic 75% of us just throw away our old electrical goods when we receive replacements.

When only 56,000 tonnes of electrical goods were recycled compared to the whopping 551,000 tonnes of electrical products that were bought last year, it is no surprise that retailers and local authorities have joined forces to try and make it easier for us all to recycle.

Laura Underwood, from Recycle Now, says: “Christmas is the ideal time to think about recycling old electricals lying about the house, to make room for the new ones.  If every household returned just one item for recycling, we could reprocess more than 24,500 tonnes of unwanted small electricals into new goods.” Or in more digestible figures you can tell your friends about, your broken old iron could be turned into thirteen food cans!

If you want to spark the trend and recycle your old electric goods before those new fangled gadgets are unwrapped, www.recyclenow.com will tell you where your nearest recycle centre is. The website will also inform you of which retailers actually take back old electrical goods when you buy new ones, which is super helpful when you have a million other things to do during party season.