The UK government should slash VAT on refurbished electrical products to keep gadgets out of landfill, according to the boss of Currys.
“It has already been charged once on these products,” said Alex Baldock, the head of the UK’s largest electrical goods retailer. “I would like to see a radical reduction or entire cut on these products.”
Baldock’s comments come as the market for secondhand electricals is growing rapidly, with new entrants such as Back Market and mainstream retailers such as Currys joining the likes of eBay and Amazon in making pre-loved gadgets more accessible.
Last week, Vinted, the secondhand fashion marketplace, launched a dedicated electronics category on its site as it caters to growing demand for trading in items such as gaming consoles, speakers, headphones, fitness trackers and smartwatches.
The cost of living crisis, and more awareness of the environmental impact of buying new items, are both driving the market.
In 2022, the UK produced the second highest amount of e-waste per person in the world. Globally, only 17% of unwanted gadgets are currently recycled.
Almost 500m small, cheap everyday electrical items from headphones to handheld fans ended up in landfill in the UK last year, according to Material Focus, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to stop electricals being hoarded and thrown away.
New technology contributes more than 1bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, just under 3% of the global total, making it the seventh biggest contributor, about half the size of the fashion industry, according to Our World in Data.
Mending a smartphone just once can save more than 77kg of carbon emissions, research by the French ecological transition agency Ademe has found.
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Currys is aiming to drive up repair and resale with techniques to cut costs such as using video calls to problem-solve often basic problems with gadgets that can potentially be fixed by pressing reset or reloading software, for example.
Baldock says about 70% of returned laptops have no fault – the problem is often software-based – while on TVs, 30% to 40% of items returned are found to be in full working order.
A team of experts based in the Currys repair centre have been fixing web-enabled devices such as TVs in this way for some time. Now the company is experimenting with using live video to help solve problems with fridges or ovens.
Repairing and selling refurbished items would help Currys reduce the 8.1m defunct gadgets sent off for recycling to external partner Environcom, just as the government is potentially gearing up to make sellers pay the full cost of that process under the “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) scheme.
Baldock says that “I hope and believe the new government will take a different stance” on EPR. He argues that recycling is expensive and if that cost cannot be passed on to customers, then retailers will do less of it.