The young adults saving unwanted tech from the tip

Hundreds of unwanted or broken electronic devices have been saved from landfill and given a new lease of life by young adults.

Volunteers who work at two charities in Hull are repairing and refurbishing desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones. They then give them out to people in the community.

Jim Rintoul, the computer project supervisor at Giroscope, a housing charity that runs recycling projects, said: “Our volunteers, in the main, are on the autistic spectrum. They are very, very talented when it comes to dealing with IT."

The volunteers say many items are thrown away when they do not need to be, as consumers upgrade to newer models.

Earlier this year, the UN reported that electronic waste was rising five times faster than documented recycling, while MPs called for greater urgency to deal an "e-waste tsunami".

The Giroscope team has received 140 donations of devices in the past six months and about 650 over four years.

Billy, 22, has autism. He has been volunteering for Giroscope for eight years and said the devices he repaired varied in condition.

“Some of them are quite good, but other ones can be in a very bad condition. If it’s too far gone, we’ll salvage what we can so we can reuse it in something else," he said.

“We take them all apart, clean them, refurbish them and if they need any repairs, we do any repairs to them.

“We give to people who need them. We also do sell them as well. All the money goes back into the project.”

Billy and the other volunteers try to save as many devices as they can from landfill. They also recycle motherboards, lithium batteries, metal and plastic cases.

“It does make me a bit upset that so many devices get thrown away when they don’t need to be," he said.

"It also doesn’t help that the companies, they always want you to upgrade to a newer model, even if the old one still works fine, by not releasing anymore updates to it.

“It feels satisfying when we save a device that would’ve otherwise been thrown away.”

Giroscope has been providing affordable housing in west Hull for more than 30 years. The refurbished devices are given to tenants who need them.

“We house something like 450 people and many, many of them don’t have laptops or don’t have smartphones,” Mr Rintoul said.

“Or if they have a smartphone, they very often don’t have any credit on it. So we can provide them pre-paid data.

“I think it opens up a whole new world to a lot of them and it also levels them up somewhat.

"They feel more equal and that’s good for their mental health and it reduces that feeling of isolation.”

A second Hull charity, The Warren Youth Project, which runs a resource centre for 18 to 25-year-olds, is also taking part in the project.

The project received funding from the Time After Time Fund – jointly supported by Virgin Media O2 and environmental charity, Hubbub,

Giroscope is asking for more donations of unwanted tech from businesses and people to allow the volunteers to meet demand.

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