I have quite a collection of recharger plugs for stolen or broken mobile phones, cordless drills, etc. These never seem to fit the newer versions. What should I do with them?

I believe in the UK they’re covered by the WEEE Directive and nearly all household waste sites have specific points for electronic equipment to ensure they’re disposed of safely.

That’s just disposal though and it would be better to reuse them if possible. If you still know the maker/model of the original piece of equipment, you might want to try putting them on eBay – or selling them at a car boot sale or giving them away on Freecycle – to see if someone else could use them. Some charities that collect old mobile phones might also welcome old chargers – they usually say whether or not they want them on their websites.

(There is a move to make a universal mobile phone charger – nearly all the major manufacturers have agreed to use it – so hopefully that’ll cut down this problem slightly in the future.)

Any other suggestions for reuses or ways to recycle them?

I’ve been wanting broken circuit boards for repurposing for a while – but there were too many big plastic slots/connectors on it for what I had in mind (namely using pieces of the circuit board to make jewellery or large flat pieces as notebook covers).

What else could be done with it? Are there any companies/organisations that specifically collect them for cannibalising/reuse/recycling or should they just be disposed of with other electronic waste?

Anyway, all the hard discs for it (and there were loads) were packaged up separately so there was a mountain of packaging by the time they’d got it all sorted.

As well as tonnes of corrugated cardboard and the foam packaging stuff I’ll feature next week, they got loads of these little solid moulded plastic trays – dummy drives – and needless to say, my first thoughts were “what a waste!” and “how could I recycle them?”

They would be absolutely ideal underneath plant pots if there weren’t two little holes at one end. I guess I could plug them with something and perhaps paint them at the same time to make them nice for under plants – but even as prolific as our spider plants are, I think I’d still be hard pushed to use them all.

So any suggestions?

John bought it five years ago for work and (ab)used it for a couple of years, then I inherited it and have used it as my main PC ever since – and given I work on it all day, every day, it’s really quite impressive that it’s lasted this long.

But now we’ve decided to finally lay it to rest. The power supply (which has been replaced once before) and batteries are utterly shot, meaning it frequently lost power when I was in the middle of my work – and not just once but over and over again until the planets align and it decided it’d accept/store power again. The screen’s casing is physically damaged after an accident a few years ago and something either to do with that or the graphics card meant there were constantly glitches appearing and disappearing from the screen. The airport (wireless) hasn’t worked for years and last time we opened it up it seemed to have melted (??!) and the paint has worn off the edges of the keyboard bit, leaving electric-shock inflicting bare metal. I was happy to live with the latter things – using a wire instead of wireless, wearing a jumper to prevent the shocks – but the power thing became unworkable. There is only so many times something can turn on then off then on then off then on then off… before you want to throw it through a window.

We’re going to see if anyone in our local geeky world can use it for its non-broken parts but if it’s not any use to them, I don’t know what else to do with it. Our usual computer recycling place refurbishes old PCs but I suspect, given this is an Apple and so uses all sorts of proprietary Apple connectors and whatnot, it’ll be too much hassle/expense to fix it.

Any suggestions though?

(Photo by John from when it was shiny and (quite) new, and we didn’t have piles of crap on our shelves)

(Also apologies for the couple of hours downtime that we had yesterday – our server was being moved or something.)

Anyway, the other day I spotted a message with the subject “joysticks” in my spam bin. Oh!, I thought, what a great Recycle This idea, there must be bazillions of obsolete and broken ones lying around!. Except it wasn’t that, it was a spammer trying to give me stock tips. Sigh.

But still though, what CAN be done with all those old joysticks and console game pads? Jewellery out of the buttons/D-pads perhaps?

(Photo by shikaz)

I have recently purchased a new printer for my personal use.

I now have a printer which sort of works, but not brilliant – and I want to know whether it is recyclable?

If it’s still working – as you say it is, someone else might prefer to take a chance on refilling the existing cartridges or replacing them with cheaper ones – so it might be worth offering it on your local Freecycle group.

Any other suggestions?

(Photo by brokenarts)

How can I recycle memory sticks?

I’m presuming he means USB memory fobs and not the bits of strips of memory used inside computers – but when broken, the latter make fun keyrings for geeks.

I had an idea of incorporating a small USB stick into a necklace – as a pendant – or other jewellery but I intended these to be functional rather than just decorative.

So any suggestions on ways to recycle or reuse them if they’re broken?

(Photo by woodsy)

I’ve got one in the garage (after upgrading to the latest version). My neighbors have some on their roofs that are unused.

What is the best way to recycle an unused satellite dish? These are the smaller DirectTV/Dish network dishes – not the big 6′ dishes.

I suspect the number of old dishes floating around is growing steadily as people (in the UK) are encouraged to flip back and forth between cable and satellite depending on the current offer of the moment.

So any suggestions?

(Photo courtesy of my neighbours across the street who have a satellite dish on the side of their house)

I suspect when a piece of remote-controlled equipment dies, people just sling out the remote too but are there any way to reuse them? Let’s assuming getting the equipment fixed isn’t possible or feasible, are there any uses for the now-redundant remote control?

Or are there any places that re-sell them? We lost our tv remote control a few years ago and after searching everywhere, bought a replacement – but the replacement was brand new, when a second-hand one would have sufficed. Then, because life is just like that, we found the original and so now have a spare – is there any way for us to pass it on?

We could do word processing on it, basic drawing and DTP – lots of serious grown-up stuff that justified it as a (second-hand) purchase to our parents … but we still mostly used it for playing games.

Our favourite game, for a long while, was a pinball game which used the ALT keys to work the flippers. Before long, the worn out ALT keys fell off. So we changed the game’s controls to use the CTRL keys instead. And ditto. And so on, until we rendered our first computer keyboard pretty much useless.

I don’t go in for such abusive gaming these days but as we live on our computers now, (my boyfriend) John and I still end up with broken keyboards from time to time, or just spare ones when one comes free with a new computer or something.

When they’re still in working order, we give them away to friends or family in need, or the local computer recycling place, but any suggestions of what we can do with broken ones, or their parts? Any recycling/upcycling ideas?

(Photo by annaink)

Yes, we remember them so, so fondly. And have a giant stack of them to get rid of.

Any ideas?

(Photo by Andrew H, c/o sxc.hu)
(We’ve been so lazy on the photo front recently. Tsk, us).