Approximately 25 million mobile phones are discarded annually in the UK — yet millions more sit untouched in office drawers, storage rooms, and IT cupboards, quietly losing value with every passing month. For IT Directors, IT Asset Managers, and Procurement leads managing a device refresh, a fleet upgrade, or an office decommission, those unused handsets are a recoverable asset that is far too often overlooked or mishandled. Selling company phones in bulk is no longer just a disposal task. It is a strategic procurement decision with real financial, legal, and environmental implications. Done well, it offsets refresh costs, reduces compliance [...]

  UK businesses are generating more devices than ever — yet the systems designed to handle those devices responsibly are barely keeping pace. Total WEEE collections in the UK reached approximately 496,000 tonnes in 2024, representing a growth of just 0.6% since 2018, despite a consistent year-on-year increase in the volume of electrical equipment being placed on the market. Display equipment volumes alone rose 8% in Q3 2024, and small mixed WEEE by 7%. The gap between what is being deployed and what is being responsibly recovered is widening — and the root cause is not a lack of recycling [...]

UK businesses are estimated to manage approximately 48 million mobile devices in 2026, with mobile fleet management adoption growing at around 18% year-on-year. That is not a niche IT concern — it is a significant operational and commercial reality for every mid-market and enterprise organisation running a distributed workforce on corporate devices. Yet despite that scale, mobile device management — MDM — is still treated as an afterthought in many UK businesses. Devices are issued without enrolment, policies are informal or unenforced, and end-of-life processes are improvised rather than planned. The result is a combination of security exposure, compliance risk, [...]

Refurbished vs New: Which Is the Better Business Buy? One in four mobile phones sold in the UK in 2023 was second-hand or refurbished — and that figure is rising sharply. Vodafone UK reported an 83% increase in refurbished device sales, and UK consumers collectively saved £5.6 billion in 2024 by choosing pre-owned products, including electronics. The direction of travel is clear. Yet many businesses still default to buying new as a matter of policy — not because the evidence supports it, but because it feels safer, more straightforward, or simply because it's always been done that way. That assumption [...]

What Circular Economy Means for Tech & IT Every year, the UK generates hundreds of thousands of tonnes of electronic waste — and the numbers are climbing. Between January and September 2024 alone, approximately 375,000 tonnes of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) were collected across the UK. Yet a significant proportion of those devices had not actually reached the end of their useful life. They were retired early, stockpiled in IT cupboards, or sent for recycling when they still held genuine resale value. This is the central tension at the heart of how businesses currently manage technology: a disposal-first [...]

  The UK generated approximately 1.65 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022 — roughly 24.5 kg per person — making it one of the highest producers of electronic waste per capita anywhere in the world. Sitting within that mountain of discarded technology are millions of iPhones: devices that still hold real monetary value, still contain recoverable materials, and in many cases still hold recoverable data. For individuals, an iPhone trade-in is simply a smart way to offset the cost of upgrading to a newer model. For businesses, the calculation is more complex — and considerably higher stakes. An IT director [...]

ESG Reporting for IT Most IT teams are sitting on an untapped ESG win — and they don't know it. Somewhere in your organisation, there are smartphones in desk drawers, tablets in storage rooms, and laptops stacked in cupboards that haven't been switched on in months. These devices feel like a minor operational nuisance: a problem to deal with eventually, when someone finds the time. But look at them through an ESG lens and the picture shifts considerably. Those dormant devices represent idle financial value, unrecorded carbon savings, missing e-waste diversion data, and — in some cases — an undisclosed [...]

WEEE Recycling: Guide for UK Businesses The UK generates approximately 24 kg of e-waste per person every year — one of the highest rates in the world. Yet despite that volume, national WEEE collection figures have barely shifted since 2018, reaching around 496,000 tonnes in 2024, a rise of just 0.6% over six years. Meanwhile, the devices being refreshed, decommissioned, and quietly accumulating in IT cupboards across the country continue to mount up. Most businesses know they have some obligation to handle electronic waste responsibly. What is far less clear — even to experienced IT managers and procurement leads — [...]

E-Waste Explained: What UK Businesses Need to Know The UK generated approximately 1.8 million tonnes of e-waste in 2025 — a 6% increase on the previous year. Of that, only around 496,000 tonnes were formally collected and processed through official channels. That gap is not simply an environmental statistic. It represents hundreds of thousands of tonnes of end-of-life electronic equipment leaving UK businesses through informal, undocumented, or non-compliant routes every year — taking unwiped data, unrecovered value, and unreported environmental impact with them. For IT directors, procurement leads, and IT asset managers, electronic waste is not a distant sustainability concern. [...]

How to Recycle Old Phones & Electronics in the UK Recycling your old phone sounds simple. Getting it right — securely, compliantly, and with maximum environmental benefit — takes a little more thought. The UK generated approximately 1.8 million tonnes of electrical waste in 2025, yet formal WEEE collections remain stuck at around 496,000 tonnes. That gap is significant. Millions of old phones, tablets, laptops, and peripherals are sitting in household drawers and corporate IT stockrooms rather than entering the compliant, value-recovering recycling streams they should. For individuals, that represents a missed opportunity. For businesses, it represents a compliance risk, [...]