Why it matters: What are your plans for broken hard drives, outdated phones, and other electronic equipment? I have a junk drawer in my family. Every time I say I’ll clean out and take the e-waste to a recycler, I never follow through. Making the detour is not very convenient because the nearest recycler is an hour’s drive away. Maybe one day.
Fortunately, Amazon has offered a more convenient alternative to disposing of electronic waste for a while. Don’t do that, please.
The Verge caught a tweet from technologist Dave Zatz over the weekend mentioning Amazon’s modest electronics recycling program. All you have to do is package the items and request a shipping label via Amazon’s recycling website. then deliver the package to your neighborhood UPS location. Alternately, if your company offers regular pickups, place it with the other outgoing packages.
For the free shipping label we need to recycle our outdated, useless small electronics, thanks to Amazon.
— Dave Zatz on July 11, 2022 (@davezatz).
Re-Teck, a third-party recycling partner of Amazon, receives your trash and sends it to a facility for “material reclamation” after erasing or destroying any identifying marks or personal information. In particular for non-functional devices, Amazon advises performing a factory reset or zeroing drives prior to sending them in, but this is not a requirement. Since these two programs are different, Amazon also advises checking its trade-in page to see if any of your e-waste qualifies for a trade-in on other purchases.
Both have been in existence for a while. The recycling program was introduced by Amazon in at least 2018, and the trade-in program was introduced by Amazon in 2011. However, unless you already know about it, it’s difficult to find Amazon’s recycling page. We had to use the customer service page’s search function because there are no direct links to it on the store’s website.
Additionally, the “amazonrecycling” domain name is used to host the resulting recycling website. Even though it’s hard to find organically, once you get there, you’ll find a web form that needs to be filled out with the necessary data, such as name, address, email, and which devices are in the shipment. You will get a shipping label to put on the package after registering.
Although the program is accessible to everyone, not just Prime subscribers or Amazon customers, there are some restrictions. Large appliances like televisions, computer towers, and others do not qualify. However, Re-Teck accepts all the smaller, more obvious suspects, including peripherals like keyboards, chargers, gaming consoles, e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. In essence, anything that can be contained in a small space should be acceptable. The recycler won’t accept devices with loose batteries or power cells that are leaking or swollen, though.
