By the time most consumers replace a mobile phone, the old one rarely goes anywhere. It is slipped into a drawer, tucked into a cupboard or left at the back of a desk “just in case” it might one day be needed again.
Now, multiply that habit across the entirety of the UK, and the scale is striking. According to research commissioned by Currys, British households are collectively storing around 880 million unused electronic devices, or roughly 30 items in every home.
The tech retailer says four in five people admit to keeping an old mobile phone, while almost one in three still owns their very first handset. Many of them ageing Nokia models that have long since disappeared from pockets, but not from cupboards.
However, for retailers and manufacturers trying to build a circular economy, these forgotten devices represent far more than just ‘clutter’. They contain valuable materials, reusable components and functioning products that could re-enter the market. While lithium-ion batteries discarded incorrectly continue to pose an increasing fire risk throughout waste and recycling systems.
Retail Gazette caught up with Currys head of sustainability Moira Thomas, who believes the challenge is no longer convincing people that recycling matters, but instead persuading them to act.
“We wanted to create more awareness,” she says of the retailer’s new Track the Tech campaign. “People have been able to recycle technology for a long time, but there are still a lot of people who don’t know that.”
The campaign, launched this month, follows a device after it is handed over in store, showing customers what happens once it leaves the shop floor. Rather than disappearing into an unknown recycling chain, devices are securely data-wiped before being assessed for refurbishment, repair, parts harvesting or material recycling.
Thomas says making that journey visible is designed to tackle one of the biggest psychological barriers identified by Currys’ research.
“Data security was a key concern,” she explains. “By showing the journey the tech goes through, we’re helping reinforce that there are processes in place to handle this properly and that their data is safe if they recycle.”
Trust is key, but only part of the story
Security concerns remain significant, but Currys’ research suggests they are only one piece of a wider behavioural puzzle.
Nearly a quarter of respondents admitted they simply did not know how to recycle electronic devices. One in three said they had “never got round to it”, while more than a quarter confessed they were keeping old technology because they might need it someday.
“The data security piece is connected to trust,” Thomas says. “But there are other barriers getting in people’s way.”
Those findings suggest the UK’s growing mountain of unused electronics is driven less by opposition to recycling than by inertia.
It is a problem with serious environmental consequences. Discarded electronics are one of the world’s fastest-growing waste streams, yet they also represent one of its richest urban mines.
Smartphones, laptops and cables contain copper, aluminium, rare earth elements and, in some premium products, even silver and gold. Recovering those materials reduces demand for new mining while cutting carbon emissions associated with manufacturing replacement products.
Currys said it collected 5.5 million items of electronic waste for reuse and recycling across the Group last year, although Thomas acknowledges it remains difficult to break down precisely what ultimately happens to every item.
“It is a combination of things being reused,” she says. “Parts are being harvested, some products are refurbished and sold again, while others are recycled. It’s actually quite a complex data set to navigate because not every device follows one route.”
That complexity reflects the increasingly sophisticated ‘reverse logistics networks’ emerging across the retail sector. Devices arriving at Currys’ repair and recycling centre in Newark may be repaired and returned to customers, dismantled for components needed in future repairs, refurbished for resale, donated through reuse networks or recycled where recovery is no longer commercially or technically viable.
But, rather than seeing repair, refurbishment and recycling as separate activities, Thomas describes them as part of a broader ecosystem giving technology “its longest possible life”.
That philosophy also increasingly sits alongside commercial opportunity. Currys reported adjusted pre-tax profits of around £191 million for the year ending May 2026, an increase of roughly 18 per cent on the previous year following improving sales and market share gains. After several difficult years for consumer electronics retailers, circular business models are becoming an increasingly important part of future growth rather than simply a sustainability initiative.
“We’re seeking to increase repairs as well, so customers have choices,” Thomas says. “They can recycle, they can have devices repaired, or they can choose refurbished rather than buying a brand-new item.”
“I think we’ve got a nice ecosystem of things customers can choose when they come to Currys.”
From regulation to refurbishment
If the first hurdle is persuading consumers to part with their old devices, the second is ensuring the industry is ready to deal with them.
For Currys, that means looking beyond recycling bins towards a broader circular economy in which products are repaired, refurbished and reused before they are ever broken down for raw materials. It is an approach that is becoming increasingly central to both environmental policy and commercial strategy.
Thomas believes regulation is helping accelerate that shift, even if businesses are still grappling with an increasingly complex legislative landscape.
“I think we can see that there’s regulation that’s driving that shift,” she says. “There’s a lot already happening.”
She points to the UK’s Circular Economy Taskforce alongside a growing list of European regulations, including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) reforms and the forthcoming Digital Product Passport (DPP) requirements under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR).
“The key thing for us is the direction of travel,” Thomas says. “Because we have operations in Europe as well as the UK, alignment is really important.”
For retailers operating across multiple jurisdictions, consistency matters as much as regulation itself. For example, Currys’ presence in Ireland and the Nordic countries means information requested by one regulator increasingly overlaps with another.
“Our first efforts are really through the CSRD directive,” Thomas explains. “Ultimately, Digital Product Passports are about getting more information from suppliers about products… what they’re made from, their repairability, their durability and recyclability.”
Like many retailers, Currys has begun by working closely with its own-brand suppliers before expanding further into its wider supply chain.
“It’s quite a lot of information that will ultimately be needed in order to present that to customers.”
But that transparency could become increasingly valuable as consumers hold onto technology for longer.
Smartphones are no longer replaced every two years with the regularity they once were, while rising hardware costs have prompted many buyers to look beyond the newest releases. And Currys is already seeing that shift reflected in demand.
“I think the market is more interested in considering refurbished technology,” Thomas says. “We’re seeing growth, particularly in mobiles, but also in refurbished laptops.”
She believes refurbished products are bringing new customers into the market rather than cannibalising sales of premium devices.
“There will always be a space for both. Some customers will always want the latest technology, but others are prepared to compromise and price might be more important.”
The wider market appears to support that assessment. Pre-owned technology specialist CeX now operates more than 630 stores across 11 countries, including almost 400 in the UK, while continuing to expand internationally. The retailer has become one of Britain’s fastest-growing consumer electronics brands, with many franchise stores generating annual turnovers exceeding £1 million.
In recent years, the second-hand electronics market has also attracted growing investment from mainstream retailers and marketplaces.
Vinted, which in 2024 began offering a dedicated electronics category for the first time, was recently valued at £6.7bn ($9bn), while Back Market, the private marketplace for refurbished electronics, has been valued at approximately €5.1bn.
MusicMagpie, one of Britain’s largest technology trade-in businesses, generated revenues of around £136.6 million before being acquired by AO World in late 2024, while eBay has significantly expanded its refurbished technology offering as consumers increasingly seek lower-cost alternatives to buying new.
With the recent news that tech giants such as Apple and Microsoft are increasing the price of new devices by as much as 20% – in response to shortages of memory and storage chips due to the rise in AI in data centers and on-device features – second hand tech might become more popular than ever.
Currys’ own research suggests that appetite is strongest among younger consumers. Half of those aged between 18 and 34 have bought refurbished technology, compared with just 29 per cent of people aged over 55.
That generational divide extends beyond purchasing habits. Among over-55s, 69 per cent had not recycled any technology during the previous year, while older consumers were also the least confident that personal data would be securely wiped from devices before reuse.
“It feels like some of those barriers are more prominent,” Thomas says.
Also, one finding particularly surprised Thomas. While only around four per cent of people said they would throw an old mobile phone into the bin, one in four admitted they would do exactly that with unwanted cables.
“I think that’s quite interesting,” she says. “People perhaps think it’s just an innocent cable, but they’re often made with copper or aluminium, and some of the more complex cables can contain silver.”
In other words, some of the most commonly discarded household items are also among the most resource-rich.
For all the debate around regulation, supply chains and circular business models, Thomas insists the challenge ultimately comes back to changing consumer behaviour.
Schemes such as Cash for Trash are often criticised for encouraging new purchases, but she sees them as practical incentives to stop unwanted technology ending up forgotten in drawers or, worse, in landfill.
“They’re there not only to create awareness that you can bring your old tech in, but also to encourage people to do it,” she says, comparing them to the carrier bag charge that helped shift public habits.
Currys may be, in her words, “a commercial enterprise first and foremost”, but she rejects the idea that profit and sustainability are competing objectives. “
Working inside a business is an opportunity to be a force for good,” she says. “What we’re doing around our sustainability priorities makes commercial sense, while making sure we’re a responsible citizen. Profit and purpose go hand in hand.”
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