Verto Recycle, Verto Recycle Ltd, Unit 197, Avenue B, Wetherby, Leeds (2026)

16/10/2026

Right to repair has been quietly growing, and it's worth paying attention to where it's heading.

Since June 2025, the UK's Ecodesign rules have covered smartphones and tablets. Manufacturers selling here now have to:
→ Supply spare parts for seven years
→ Provide security updates for five years
→ Share repair manuals and diagnostic tools with professional repairers

The EU's Right to Repair Directive is on the same track, due in national law across member states by mid-2026. The direction of travel is towards products designed to last longer and be fixed more easily, which is a genuinely good thing for the amount of electronics we get through.

Repairable design slows the flow of e-waste, and it's welcome. The volume already in circulation is enormous, though, and even a well-repaired device reaches the end of its life eventually. Repair changes the timing of that, and the kit that does reach end of life will often be older and more thoroughly used, retired in batches as support windows finally close. It still needs collecting, treating and accounting for properly.

Right to repair and responsible recycling pull in the same direction. One keeps equipment in use for as long as it's useful, and the other makes sure that when its working life is genuinely over, the materials inside it are recovered rather than lost.

For any business managing a fleet of devices, both belong in the same plan. Repair what's worth repairing, and have a proper route for everything that has reached the end.

14/10/2026

Earlier today, there was a fire at our Wetherby facility.

Our staff contained the fire and dealt with it brilliantly. No one was injured, and no materials were lost. We’re still fully operational.

A big thank you to West Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service for their support today. We’re grateful for the work they do.

Thank you also to our team. You followed every procedure to the letter, and we’re proud of how you handled it.

Fire is a risk every recycling site has to plan for. That’s why we have a fire risk assessment and safety plan in place. Today our team put it into practice, and it worked.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with the team.

14/10/2026

Today is International E-Waste Day, and this year's theme is a good one: Fast Tech.

It's the WEEE Forum's name for the flood of cheap electronics we now buy on impulse and bin without a second thought. The charging cable from a service station, the earbuds that lasted a month, the USB adapter, the mini desk fan, the string of LED lights from last Christmas. The parallel they draw is with fast fashion, and it fits. UK spend on this stuff nearly quadrupled to £11.6bn in 2025.

At work, it creates a specific problem. Big items like laptops and servers get logged and sent to a proper processor. Fast Tech slips under all of that. It's too small and too cheap for anyone to think of as an asset, so it never makes the register and never reaches a certified recycler.

The catch is that every one of those items has a plug, a cable or a battery, which makes it WEEE and often hazardous. A drawer full of dead cables and old earbuds is unaccounted electrical waste, sitting on your premises with no record of how it will be dealt with.

The fix is a simple habit. Give the small stuff somewhere proper to go, a dedicated collection point for cables, chargers and accessories, and have it processed alongside the larger kit.

If your business has never thought about where its small electronics end up, today is a good prompt to start.

12/10/2026

Retired IT has a value clock running on it, and finance teams feel it more than anyone.

The day a server or a fleet of laptops is decommissioned is usually the day it's worth the most on the secondary market. From there, it falls steadily. Industry estimates put the curve at roughly:
→ 40 to 60% of original value still held at two years
→ A further 3 to 5% of what's left lost for every month it then sits
→ Parts or scrap value by year six or seven

The trouble is that decommissioned kit rarely gets treated as the financial asset it still is. It comes off the rack, goes into a storeroom, and waits for someone to have time to deal with it. Every month it sits there, the return it could have made quietly shrinks.

The way to hold onto that return is to know what's coming out and when, and to move it on while it still has value.

We handle that decommissioning promptly and securely, with the documentation to match, so retired kit keeps moving while it still holds its value.

If your retired IT tends to pile up before anyone gets to it, it's worth putting decommissioning on a schedule the same way you would any other asset decision.

09/10/2026

Most businesses have a rough idea of their electrical waste and a lot of grey area around the rest. What actually counts as WEEE, where it all ends up, and whether the paperwork would stand up if someone asked. The uncertainty tends to sit there until an audit or a clear-out forces the question.

A waste assessment is how we clear that up.

One of our team will contact you for details of the waste and ask if this is typical generation, working from a written description and photos of what you’re looking to send. You get a straight read on where things stand and what could be better, covering:
→ Any electrical waste you produce
→ Any data-bearing kit that needs proper destruction
→ Any records you’d need to prove your chain of custody

It's a practical review that gives you a clear picture of what you have and a plan for handling it properly.

If you’ve never had your WEEE setup looked at, or it’s been a while, it’s worth doing. Send us the details at [email protected], and one of the team will pick it up.

05/10/2026

Recovering metal from old equipment saves a serious amount of carbon, and for the sustainability teams we talk to, that's the part worth paying attention to.

It comes down to where the emissions sit. When metal is recovered and used again, it skips the most energy-heavy stage of its life, being dug out of the ground and refined from ore. The savings are large and well documented:
→ Recycling aluminium uses around 95% less energy than making it from raw ore
→ Recycled copper carries roughly 65% lower CO2 than copper mined from scratch

That maths applies directly to what comes through our site. The cable, electronics and machinery we handle are full of copper and aluminium, and every tonne we recover and send back into manufacturing is a tonne that avoids being mined.

The equipment your business retires has a carbon story attached to it. Choosing recovery over disposal turns that into a measurable saving, and if you're building out your Scope 3 picture or your circular economy reporting, where your old electricals end up is a genuine line in it.

29/09/2026

Ask most businesses what counts as WEEE, and you'll get the usual answers. Old laptops, dead monitors, the server that finally packed in.
All of this is correct. The trouble is that's a fraction of what actually qualifies.

The rule is simpler than people expect. If it has a plug or a battery, or it runs on electricity, it counts as WEEE once you're done with it. That pulls in far more than the obvious IT kit:
→ The drawer full of tangled chargers and cables
→ Powered tools from the workshop
→ Smoke detectors and thermostats
→ Sensors and lab or test equipment
→ The little desk fan nobody's touched since summer

All of it should be handled properly rather than dropped in with the general waste. Each item feels too small to bother with on its own, but across a site over a year it adds up, and it's still your waste to account for.

If you're clearing out and you're unsure whether something qualifies, the safe assumption is that anything electrical does. We can take the lot and sort it from there.

22/09/2026

WRAP found that 87% of UK households try to recycle at least one thing their kerbside collection doesn't actually take. Usually it comes from good intentions, someone hoping an item can be saved rather than binned. The problem is that one wrong item can drag down everything around it.

The same thing happens with commercial loads, and the stakes are higher.

When electrical waste comes in mixed with the wrong materials, it causes two problems at once. The recovery value drops because contaminated material is harder to process and worth less once it is. Traceability takes a hit too, because a load that has to be picked apart and re-sorted is one nobody can cleanly account for.

Batteries are the clearest example. A single lithium cell hidden in a bin of general WEEE is both a fire risk and a contaminant, and it can compromise a whole container of otherwise clean material. The same goes for the wrong plastics or general rubbish finding their way into an electricals collection.

Keeping a load clean is mostly about habit:
→ Clear labelling on bins so the right things go in the right place
→ A quick word with the team about what belongs where
→ Separating obvious hazards like batteries before they reach the bin

It takes very little effort, and a clean load recovers more and accounts for itself properly.

If your electrical waste shares a bin with anything else, it's worth a look.

21/09/2026

Councils, NHS trusts and schools move an enormous amount of IT through their doors every year. Devices come in on procurement frameworks, get used hard for a few years, and cycle out again in big batches. Almost all of it has held data, and a lot of that data is about the public.

That's what makes disposal in these sectors a different kind of job. A trust decommissioning a ward's worth of equipment, or a council refreshing hundreds of laptops at once, is handling patient records, case files and personal details at real scale. The duty to protect that information stays with the organisation right up until the data is properly destroyed.

Volume is where things slip, because the higher the numbers, the harder it gets to prove every single drive was accounted for. That's exactly the point a regulator or auditor will press on. The ICO expects secure, documented destruction of personal data, and NCSC sets the standard for how that sanitisation is done. Meeting both across hundreds of devices takes a process built for it.

That process is what we run:
→ Every asset tracked from the point of collection
→ Wiped or destroyed to the NCSC standard
→ Matched to a certificate, so the record covers the whole batch rather than a sample

For a public body, that evidence is what turns handling the data properly into something you can actually prove.

If you procure IT through a framework, it's worth checking that end-of-life disposal is held to the same standard as everything else in it.

17/09/2026

Saturday is World Cleanup Day, when millions of people head out to clear litter from beaches, parks and streets. It's a brilliant thing to see. There's one waste stream it will mostly miss, though, because you can't pick it up off a verge.

E-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world, and the least recycled. The UN found that only 22.3% of it was documented as properly collected and recycled in 2022. The rest goes to landfill, sits forgotten in drawers and storerooms, or gets handled in ways nobody can account for.

Most of it never looks like litter. It's the laptop in a bottom drawer, the pallet of old kit in the corner of a warehouse, the server that got swapped out and shoved in a cupboard. Out of sight, quietly building up.

This is the part businesses can actually shift. A lot of the world's e-waste comes from organisations replacing equipment, which means the decisions that matter sit with the people managing it. Choosing proper treatment and recovering what's inside the hardware is exactly the kind of cleanup that adds up.

You won't be out with a litter picker for this one, but the store room and the server cupboard are as good a place to start as any.

Verto Recycle

16/10/2026

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