Nearly every clean-up we run turns up at least some electronic waste, old phone chargers, broken radios, the occasional discarded television, mixed in with general dumping. For most of our history we've handled it the same way as general waste, which we've come to recognise isn't a genuinely good answer, and this year we've started building a more deliberate approach.
Why e-waste doesn't fit our usual sorting categories
Our standard three-way sort, general waste, recyclables, organics, works well for the large majority of what turns up at a clean-up, but electronic waste doesn't sit comfortably in any of those categories. It isn't safe to treat as general waste given the materials involved, some of which are genuinely hazardous if it ends up in an uncontrolled landfill environment, and it isn't handled by the same recyclers who take our plastic and general recyclable material, e-waste recycling requires specialised handling that our existing recycling partnership isn't set up for.
For a long time, that gap meant e-waste we collected at a clean-up ended up going out with general waste by default, simply because we didn't have a better option readily available, an outcome we're not comfortable with in hindsight given what we now understand about how it should be handled.
Building a proper collection pathway
We've spent the past few months identifying a licensed e-waste handler willing to accept the modest volumes a community clean-up typically generates, smaller operations like ours don't produce enough e-waste at any single collection to be attractive to handlers set up for large institutional volumes, which took more searching than we expected before we found a workable partner. We now set electronic waste aside as its own separate category at every clean-up, stored securely until we have enough accumulated to justify a collection trip to our e-waste partner.
This has meant a small operational change at every clean-up briefing, adding a fourth sorting category alongside our usual three, and making sure volunteers know to flag anything that looks electronic rather than assuming it belongs with general waste, since it isn't always obvious to a volunteer sorting quickly whether a given item counts.
What we're still figuring out
This is a newer part of our clean-up process than our general waste, recycling and organics handling, and we're honest that it's not yet as smooth. Storage between collection trips takes space we don't have a great deal of, and coordinating pickup timing with our e-waste partner around when we've actually accumulated enough volume to justify a trip has taken more back-and-forth than our other waste partnerships.
We're also exploring whether household e-waste, old chargers, broken small appliances sitting unused in a compound rather than dumped publicly, could be collected through the same pathway alongside what we find during clean-ups, since we suspect a meaningful amount of household e-waste currently has no better outlet than sitting indefinitely or eventually going out with general rubbish for lack of an easier alternative.
Why we're documenting this while it's still a work in progress
We're sharing this now, while the process is still being refined, rather than waiting until it's fully polished, because we think it's a useful example of a real limitation in how community clean-ups typically get handled and how we're working through it, imperfectly and step by step, rather than pretending we had a complete answer from the outset. If your household has electronic waste it doesn't have a good disposal route for, or if you know of an e-waste handler in Nairobi we should be talking to, we'd welcome hearing from you through our Contact page.
Why this matters beyond a single clean-up category
Electronic waste carries risks that general household or construction waste doesn't, certain components can leach harmful substances if left in an uncontrolled landfill environment over time, which is part of why proper handling matters more than it might seem for what's often a small volume relative to everything else we collect. Getting this right, even at the modest scale a community clean-up generates, is consistent with the broader environmental stewardship our Constitution commits us to, not just clearing visible litter but handling every waste category responsibly, including the ones that are easy to overlook because they're a smaller part of the total.
We also see this as a useful test case for our broader approach to problems we don't yet have a fully worked-out answer for: document the gap honestly, search out the right specialised partner rather than forcing an ill-suited existing solution, and build the pathway incrementally rather than waiting until every detail is settled before starting. It's a pattern we expect to apply again as other, less common waste categories inevitably turn up at future clean-ups.
We'll report back once the collection pathway is fully established and we have a clearer sense of typical volumes and timelines, since we suspect other small community groups in Nairobi are facing the same gap without yet having found a workable answer, and a documented, working example could genuinely save another group the months of searching this has taken us so far.