Find out how partnerships with Material Focus can make a lasting difference.
GiffGaff got behind our campaign on Black Friday, encouraging their customers to recycle old phones when buying a refurbished one and to find their nearest recycling point.
Thousands of Sky staff brought electricals into work to be recycled when Sky piloted a scheme in partnership with us and Global Action Plan.
Reading council doubled kerbside collections of recycled electricals after becoming one of our first local authority partners.
Dorset Reclaim uses our grant funding to help get much-needed refurbished electricals to vulnerable families setting up home.
Inspire and educate the people who matter to you
Contact us today to talk about what we could do together
With our knowledge of the electrical waste sector and in-depth research we have almost all the facts and stats you need on this topic. And if we don’t have them, we probably know someone who does.
Explore research
We support innovative research and projects making it easier to recycle electricals.
Learn more about funding
Tried and tested, award-winning communications materials to inspire and engage your audiences – available to download from our online library.
Explore toolkits
We’re constantly gathering evidence that shows how people and organisations like yours are creating change. Chat to us if your organisation would like to explore how we could work together.
Contact us
We can direct you, your community or employees to over 27,000 reuse and recycling points and counting.
It’s just one example of the smart innovation we’re delivering.
Making it easier all the time to recycle your electricals.
Recycling locator
Material Focus is an independent not-for-profit organisation on a mission to change the way we think about our unwanted electricals, helping us all see them as valuable resources rather than useless waste. We want to make it simpler for each and every one of us in the UK to recycle our old and unwanted electricals or send them to be refurbished and reused. We do this by working with local authorities, community organisations, producers, retailers, high-profile individuals and experts, and the public.
Recycle Your Electricals is a UK-wide campaign calling on households to stop throwing away or hoarding their old electricals – and start reusing and recycling them.
We motivate and make it easier for everyone to reuse or recycle all their unwanted electricals, saving precious resources from being lost forever. Our best-in-class online Recycling Locator helps people find their nearest electrical recycling point. We work at all levels from grassroots organisations to high profile media campaigns in collaboration with designers, artists, businesses and influencers. Find out more
Although we’ve only been up and running since early 2020, we’re already making a big difference. We have developed the leading online Recycling Locator for the public to drop off their electricals for fixing, donating or recycling. There are now over 22,000 points on the locator. To date, we have worked with over 200 local authorities, and funded over 60 reuse and recycling projects, from the Orkneys to the Isles of Scilly. Our mesmerising messenger, HypnoCat has appeared widely across the UK, helping to get more and more people to start recycling their electricals. And the issue is becoming more high profile. We’re seeing huge increases in stories reporting on the hidden potential of our old electricals, with thousands of media articles mentioning our work, both online, in the press and on TV and radio.
HypnoCat is our award-winning messenger, bringing pink fluffy charm and personality to the campaign. He appears across the UK on billboards, bus sides, social media and on leaflets and magazines through people’s letterboxes – hypnotising the nation into recycling their electricals. In 2021 he scooped more than a couple of prestigious communications awards.
Our funding comes from UK WEEE Regulations Compliance Fees. Electrical producers pay these fees if they don’t meet annual recycling targets set by the government. The fees are set higher than the average costs of collections to encourage collections to take place. We manage spending of the fees to support reuse and recycling of electricals in the UK. Learn more about our funding and governance.
