We do not instinctively think of the 11,209 Charity Shops in the UK as being part of the Waste industry. To even say so feels somehow sacrilegious – they are supposed to be altruistic, feelgood places, somewhere to show our generosity by giving away that which others might put to good use.

But that is naive. Charity shops are an increasingly essential part of the infrastructure of waste disposal.

Consider: only between ten and 30 per Cent of second-hand donations to charity shops are resold in store. The rest disappears into a vast sorting apparatus to be graded and sold on to commercial partners, often for export.

The initial work is commonly done by the elderly, and for free – of the 213,600 people working in UK charity shops last year, 186,800 were volunteers.

But the networks of people involved in processing, reselling, and eventually reusing the things we give away encircle the globe like a ball of yarn, conveying our unwanted tat to people who need it, in Afghanistan or India or Togo.

In the UK, 70 per cent of used clothing is exported. That amounted to more than 395,000 tons in 2018, cumulatively worth £451 million.

Following the trail from England, I visited the largest second-hand clothes market in Ghana, where 30,000 traders cram into seven claustrophobic acres in the heart of the city. Hundreds of bales of old clothes arrive in Accra’s Kantamanto market daily to be sorted and sold. Over an entrance is a sign that says ‘Obroni wawu’ (Dead white man’s clothes).

Beyond the stalls, there are seamstresses, cobblers and dyers, who with a quick soak can restore a fading T-shirt or pair of jeans.

Men wield flat irons, heated over hot coals, to spruce up the 15 million garments which move through here every week, before spreading out across Ghana and into Côte D’Ivoire, Togo, Niger, Benin and beyond.

Even unwearable material is likely to end up shredded and recycled into rags. But the charity shop donations that end up here, however well intended, have done as much harm as good because they eliminate good manufacturing jobs.

Unable to compete with the flood of cheap goods into Africa, local textile manufacturing sectors collapsed, unable to compete on price with a product better-off people were throwing away. 

These are the unintended consequences of our wastefulness: we give our things away to avoid them ending up in landfill here, yet unwittingly they end up on a worse dump site thousands of miles away. This is the result of our globalised waste system. It is not a flaw but how the system is designed.

Why do we donate our unwanted things? Is it altruism, or is it the assuaging of guilt? (It can be both). It’s not that we shouldn’t be using charity shops, which are set up and run in good faith by people trying to do good things in the world.

In the UK, this second-hand trade makes more than £330 million per year for their parent charities, saving 339,000 tons of clothing from landfills and incineration, and 6.9 million tons of carbon dioxide. But we should also be honest. Let’s admit that bag of half-broken toys, or unwanted Christmas presents, isn’t headed to the Salvation Army because you really believe in the mission. It’s to stop it cluttering up your home.

Let the charity shops, in turn, acknowledge that for the most part your old television or Victoriana dining table is not going to be bought by some retro-loving local, but dismantled for parts, or burned, because nobody else wants it.

And let’s not allow fashion brands to claim their recycling drives are anything more than a way of ensuring that our sudden pangs of waste-conscious guilt don’t impact on their bottom line.

Donating isn’t a salvation. Mostly, it’s a simple case of making our very modern problem – having far too much stuff – someone else’s.

THERE’S A GOLDMINE IN YOUR OBSOLETE PHONES

The fastest growing waste stream in the world is electricals and electronics, amounting to 53.6 million tons in 2019 and is growing by 2 per cent a year.

It’s hardly surprising.

In 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43 billion smartphones, 2.34 billion computers, 3.21 billion televisions, and 550 million pairs of headphones.

And that’s not to mention the hundreds of millions of appliances, games consoles, sex toys, electric scooters and other battery-powered devices.

Globally, only 17.4 per cent of electronic waste is recycled. As for the fate of the remaining 82.6 per cent, we simply don’t know. Between 7 and 20 per cent is estimated to be exported, and around 8 per cent thrown into landfills and incinerators. The rest is unaccounted for.

Most electronic devices are probably not disposed of at all, but live on in perpetuity, tucked away forgotten in drawers and cupboards. My kitchen drawer has at least two old iPhones and three pairs of headphones in it, which we have kept ‘just in case’.

And yet, electrical and electronic waste is, by weight, among the most precious waste there is. One piece can contain as many as 60 elements – iron, copper, aluminium and a host of rare metals including cobalt, neodymium, and tantalum.

A typical iPhone contains around 0.018g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium, and a tiny fraction of platinum. That might seem small, but you’ll find ten to 50 times more copper in a ton of electronics than in a ton of copper ore, and 100 times more gold per ton of smartphones than ore from even the most productive mine.

Up to 7 per cent of the world’s gold reserves may currently be contained in e-waste.

The value of materials in our e-waste is estimated at £50.9 billion a year. As a result, several large mining and metals companies have set up e-waste recycling divisions, recast as ‘urban mining’. At a vast recycling factory in California, I watched 250 employees dismantle and shred old tech. Nine men took apart large flat-screen TVs with electric screwdrivers.

On a noticeboard, old parts were pinned up as visual aids: wire scraps, memory card and monitor casings.

The facility’s centrepiece is the shredder, three storeys high and stretching the length of the building, with ultra-hardened spinning blades that cut through aluminium and plastic like ice in a blender. Magnetic belts, air-sorters and filters size and separate the materials, dropping each into giant ‘super sacks’ before a robot arm picks up parts.

Once, the business relied on selling the recovered metals on the commodity markets. Now it makes its money by charging customers a fee for disposal, dismantling, data removal and recycling.

For most customers, the motive is not to reduce waste, but cyber-security. They need to be sure that personal data stored on devices has been wiped and the old machines shredded.

Increasingly, there is a built-in obsolescence with modern technology – a limit on the number of uses that appliances are manufactured to withstand before they conk out.

Some obsolescence is good: replacing cars for more fuel-efficient models, for example, or plastic bottles that contain fewer toxic chemicals. But the electronics industry has faced allegations that planned obsolescence is contributing to our rising tide of e-waste.

In 2017, Apple admitted it had been using software to slow the performance of older iPhones. It claimed the move was to protect devices from electrical issues associated with ageing lithium-ion batteries, but critics argued that by hiding the problem, Apple was encouraging people to upgrade their phones earlier than necessary.

As electronic appliances have become more complex, we have become ever more divorced from how they function. They have become black boxes, which most of us have no idea how to repair or even maintain.

Many manufacturers have removed the ability for consumers to replace even commonplace parts such as batteries. Apple attempts to prevent us from opening its devices through the use of proprietary screws.

Companies argue that repairs must be conducted by trained professionals, and in many cases by the company itself – for a hefty fee, of course.

I remember as a teenager, working weekends at a mobile phone repair stall, swapping out dud batteries and broken screens from old Nokias and Motorolas for new ones. But today, smart devices are fundamentally more difficult to fix.

Once-removable parts are printed on to circuit boards; tiny earbuds cannot be opened; software locks prevent devices receiving updates, rendering them unusable after as little as two years.

YOUR RECYCLING IS JUST A DROP IN THE OCEAN

Unlike household waste, industrial waste is not taken to be weighed and processed at a materials recovery facility. Instead, it is amassed on private land, in landfills, effluent ponds and slag heaps. It is also flushed into rivers and expelled into the air. Very little data exists on it: what it is, where it is, how toxic it might be.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) breaks down household waste for every person in America every year, but does not publish regular data on industrial waste.

Even a definition is disputed. The EPA defines ‘non-hazardous industrial wastes’, but excludes waste left over from oil and gas production, coal ash, and all mining waste, despite these amounting to the largest source of waste, by weight.

In the UK, ‘commercial and industrial’ wastes amounted to 43.9 million tons in 2018, plus a further 57.5 million tons of ‘non-hazardous construction and demolition wastes’. Household wastes, by contrast, totalled just 26.4 million tons – that is, just 11.8 per cent of the total.

This is the reality about waste. For all our focus on household recycling rates, for all the effort spent washing out yogurt pots and collecting bottles, the vast majority of waste happens upstream, before our products ever get to us. This is the waste built into everything we buy, and which dwarfs that which we throw away.

Faced with the scale of industrial waste, our individual actions can begin to feel pointless, a grain of sand on a beach.

That said, it is not my intention to place the entirety of our waste problem at the feet of industry (though they deserve more responsibility than they willingly take). Rather, it is to acknowledge the inherent waste within everything we make and consume, so that we can start honest conversations about waste, and the true scale of our wastefulness.

INCINERATION: IT’S A BURNING ISSUE

Six days a week, a train travels 110 miles from London to Bristol. Carrying no passengers, its 78 container cars are full of the collective refuse of more than 1.6 million West Londoners – from Ealing, Brent, Harrow, Hounslow, Hillingdon and Richmond boroughs.

Known as ‘Binliners’, the trains are waste freight, carrying urban garbage to meet its end.

One Friday in November, I followed the route to Avonmouth on the banks of the River Severn. The Severnside Energy Recovery Centre is a modern industrial building with a gleaming frontage and stepped architecture that you wouldn’t associate with burning garbage. The only sign of its true purpose is the chimney stretching skyward, so tall it sways slowly in the wind.

Technically, it is not an incinerator but an energy-from-waste plant. It burns 430,000 tons of waste a year and produces up to 40 megawatts of energy for the National Grid. Enough, apparently, to charge every phone in the UK at the same time. The percentage of the UK’s waste that ends up burned has grown from 9 per cent in 2001 to 48 per cent in 2021 – a 435 per cent increase. In the EU, which burns just over a quarter of its trash, incinerators power 18 million homes.

At Severnside, cranes unload the rail containers on to trucks, which lug burst garbage sacks, ribbons of plastic, soiled clothing, old furniture and shattered wood to ‘the pit’, a cavernous trench, larger than eight Olympic swimming pools.

Cranes lift waste from the pit and drop it down two large hoppers, where ram feeders push the waste into the furnace.

At the Swiss-built incinerator, I watched the rubbish conflagrate and burn, bags melt and twist apart, wisps of polythene ash caught in the updraft.

The disintegrating waste dropped down a series of ledges, like a penny-pusher at a fairground, until all that was left was ash and gases. Bottom ash makes up the majority of waste left after incineration. It mostly comprises material that does not combust, such as glass and minerals, but can also contain heavy metals – mainly from electronics but also gold, jewellery and coins – which can be extracted and recycled.

Severnside produces 102,000 tons of bottom ash every year. After any recyclable metals are removed, what remains is converted into aggregate for the construction industry, ending up as breeze blocks or as material for new roads.

But generally, incineration directly competes with recycling. Countries and cities that burn the most waste recycle less. Japan, which incinerates 78 per cent of its household waste, has a recycling rate of only 20 per cent. London burns the largest share of its household waste in the UK, and has the lowest recycling rate. In some cases, even waste that families have carefully sorted into their recycling bins is burned. This is because incinerators need fuel, and many recyclables are high in calorific value.

Plastics, being essentially fossil fuels, burn particularly well. A lot of plastic film, which is not recyclable with current technologies, ends up here.

Some incinerators have new technology to reduce their carbon emissions, while others use leftover heat from the furnace to power nearby homes and businesses.

But even as the UK, US and China double down on incineration as a disposal method, other countries are having doubts over its sustainability. The EU recently disqualified energy-from-waste plants from some funding and grants because they are incompatible with Brussels’ Net Zero and waste reduction targets.

Not for the first time, the practice of burning our waste is being questioned, though this time less for reasons of pollution than something more fundamental: is it the right thing to do?

A senior Severnside engineer told me he was frustrated because people seem to forget that not all waste is recyclable or reusable. The question is what you do with the rest of it.

We’re left with a simple choice: do we want to bury our waste in landfills, or burn it?

© Oliver Franklin-Wallis 2023

• Adapted from Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, And Why It Matters, by Oliver Franklin-Wallis, to be published by Simon & Schuster on June 22 at £20. To order a copy for £18, visitmailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Offer valid to July 1. UK p&p free on orders over £25.