Bridging the digital divide: using e‑waste to address digital exclusion

Over the course of the pan­dem­ic the issue of dig­i­tal exclu­sion has been thrust into the spot­light as peo­ple who live in dig­i­tal pover­ty have been increas­ing­ly left out in a world where every­thing from work and school, to doc­tors’ appoint­ments and social­is­ing has become dig­i­tal-first. 

Accord­ing to data from Ofcom, 6% of UK house­holds were described as “offline” in March 2021, with its research find­ing that dig­i­tal exclu­sion is “more dis­em­pow­er­ing than ever”. Across the UK, 14.9 mil­lion adults have a ‘low’ dig­i­tal engage­ment score — mean­ing they do not use email or online bank­ing, accord­ing to Lloyds Bank’s 2021 Con­sumer Dig­i­tal Index. Among peo­ple who claim Uni­ver­sal Cred­it, includ­ing for dis­abil­i­ty, this pro­por­tion ris­es to 35%, while there is also a geo­graph­ic split with 33% put in the ‘low’ cat­e­go­ry in Wales but only 20% in Lon­don.

It is clear that get­ting every­one online is becom­ing more crit­i­cal than ever. And as soci­eties turn towards more cir­cu­lar economies, recom­merce, which is the process of reselling or repur­pos­ing sec­ond-hand goods, has become a dri­ving force in bridg­ing the dig­i­tal divide.

With the option to wipe and refresh used com­put­ers and pass them on so that they can have a sec­ond life, both busi­ness­es and house­holds can help those who are exclud­ed from the dig­i­tal world.

The digital divide internationally

One char­i­ty focus­ing on this issue is The Tur­ing Trust, which was set up by James Tur­ing to hon­our the lega­cy of his great uncle Alan Tur­ing. It refur­bish­es donat­ed IT equip­ment and sends it to schools, pri­mar­i­ly, over the past decade, in Ghana and Malawi. 

“For most of the stu­dents we’re work­ing with in Malawi, it will be their first time ever touch­ing a com­put­er with their own hands,” says Tur­ing. “The fact that [the device] is a bit slow is irrel­e­vant as long as it’s still func­tion­al and, most impor­tant­ly, has a few years of life left in it.” 

When the pan­dem­ic hit, the char­i­ty start­ed receiv­ing requests from the UK. Over the past year, it has been pro­vid­ing com­put­ers for UK stu­dents, pri­mar­i­ly dur­ing lock­down although its work is con­tin­u­ing. This was facil­i­tat­ed by the shift to work­ing from home, which result­ed in many com­pa­nies own­ing desk­top com­put­ers they no longer need­ed.

This was the sit­u­a­tion invest­ment com­pa­ny Rath­bones found itself in. “As we adapt­ed to the remote work­ing envi­ron­ment at the onset of the pan­dem­ic, we found we had a large num­ber of desk­top com­put­ers across our 15 offices that were sur­plus to require­ments,” recalls Andy Brodie, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer. As a result, it donat­ed just under 1,000 desk­top com­put­ers, many of which were just a year old. 

“The whole process was very straight­for­ward and The Tur­ing Trust han­dled every­thing from col­lec­tion of the equip­ment to dis­tri­b­u­tion,” he adds.

The char­i­ty accepts dona­tions of lap­tops, desk­tops, tablets and phones from both busi­ness­es and indi­vid­u­als. Com­put­ers that might be a bit old and slow for high-pow­ered lawyers can still work rea­son­ably well if they are giv­en to a school or house­hold instead but typ­i­cal­ly, the devices should be less than six years old. 

“That way we can be fair­ly sure we’re going to get at least three, if not five or more years of life out of it,” says Tur­ing.

Once they receive the devices, the data is wiped by vol­un­teers. And while some vol­un­teers are pure­ly there to help, oth­ers get involved because it pro­vides an oppor­tu­ni­ty to gain hard­ware IT Skills. “Most peo­ple are a bit wor­ried about break­ing com­put­ers, if they’re try­ing to learn for the first time, which is not some­thing we’re exces­sive­ly con­cerned about,” says Tur­ing. Dis­cov­er­ing this moti­va­tion among their vol­un­teers allowed the char­i­ty to set up train­ing cours­es in con­junc­tion with job cen­tres for peo­ple in long-term unem­ploy­ment to gain hard­ware IT skills. 

“The dig­i­tal divide is a three-part prob­lem,” notes Ross Cock­burn, the founder of the char­i­ty Reusing IT. “It’s the device, it’s the con­nec­tiv­i­ty and then it’s the edu­ca­tion to use the kit.” He explains that donat­ing a com­put­er may not be very help­ful if the par­ents of a child do not have the con­fi­dence to nav­i­gate it or if the fam­i­ly is cut off from the inter­net. 

When com­pa­nies con­sid­er whether to donate their devices, a key ques­tion is who is going to take own­er­ship of the removal of the data. “It still baf­fles me that many organ­i­sa­tions seem to think the only way to destroy the data [on a device] is to destroy the hard dri­ve or phys­i­cal­ly destroy the com­put­er,” says Cock­burn. 

Dealing with e‑waste

The UK is cur­rent­ly the sec­ond-largest pro­duc­er of e‑waste in the world, with every per­son bin­ning 23.9kg of gad­gets and appli­ances a year on aver­age, accord­ing to the Glob­al E‑Waste Mon­i­tor. In July, the UK intro­duced the ‘right to repair’ law to force man­u­fac­tur­ers to make longer-last­ing appli­ances but recom­merce con­tin­ues to play a major role in tack­ling e‑waste.

The char­i­ty Reusing IT works with com­put­er donors includ­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of Aberdeen, the Uni­ver­si­ty of St Andrews and NHS Loth­i­an. The char­i­ty receives about 1,500 com­put­ers from NHS Loth­i­an a year, with hard dri­ves removed by NHS teams before­hand. 

“We have a fan­tas­tic rela­tion­ship with them,” says Cock­burn. “It’s great for their inter­nal morale,” as staff mem­bers appre­ci­ate that a com­put­er that might be worth­less and redun­dant for the NHS can be trans­formed into a new com­put­er for a child in Africa to get an edu­ca­tion.

Reflect­ing on recom­merce, he says it’s no dif­fer­ent to ask­ing: why do we have food banks and yet we destroy so much food? “We just destroy too many com­put­ers for the wrong rea­sons.”