We’ve had an email from Elizabeth:

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?

We were around at our friend’s house the other night when John spotted a very cool looking piece of computer circuitry in the bin – a broken motherboard.

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?

A few weeks ago I was at the HQ of BrightBox, a Ruby-on-Rails hosting company/ISP, and they’d just taken delivery of a huge new computer server thing (apologies for getting overly technical there).

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?

My beloved laptop died last week. It’s actually been dying for about a year but my patience/unwillingness to buy a new one combined with a few last ditch life-extending efforts by John meant it only shuffled off the.. electro-magnetic coil last week.

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.)

Because I run a number of websites as well as generally having been around the whole internet thing for a while, I get a LOT of spam. A ridiculous amount. Thankfully most of it gets caught by my spam filter these days but it does get a bit over-sensitive sometime so I have to go through my spam bin about once a week to check there aren’t any false positives in there. (Handy hint: when doing so, sort by subject – makes it far easier to scan through.)

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)