You have a drawer full of old phones, laptops, tablets, chargers with no matching devices, and random other tech bits and pieces that you don’t know what to do with. So do billions of other people around the world. Electronic waste is a global crisis, and an opportunity.
69 million tonnes of e-waste was generated worldwide in 2022 (Global E Waste Monitor) while the UK produces approximately 24 kg per capita of e-waste (Statista) annually. Much of it ends up in landfill or is shipped abroad rather than recycled. Yet we throw away consumer tech containing upwards of 60 billion dollars value in gold, silver and other metals annually (World Economic Forum).
But here’s the thing your screens won’t tell you. You can turn that laptop nobody uses anymore, forgotten tablet hiding at the back of your shelf, or cracked-screen phone into something you actually use without handing it over to a recycling facility. Something genuinely useful. Not “oh look I made a plant pot” Pinterest levels of shoddy but actually useful stuff you’ll keep around. How? By learning what’s inside your electronics and how the individual components can be repurposed to do completely different things.
Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t turn old circuit boards into art when you want. Just that there’s more you can do with your unused tech than drain solder from its components. When only 22 percent of global e-waste is properly recycled each year (United Nations Institute for Training and Research) keeping usable components out of landfills through creative repurposing starts to sound less like DIY and more like responsibility.
## Understanding Electronic Lifespans
Electric devices are designed to last a long time. Far longer than their non-tech parts. A modern tablet contains components that will last decades, often longer than the device turns on. Whether it boots to a functioning operating system depends largely on software and recent security updates, not hardware failure.
Knowing how electronic components fail is essential to dismantling a used device for parts. Most failures occur at the system level first, with individual components continuing to operate after the thing they’re installed in stops working properly. A laptop failing to boot is often hiding a perfectly functional display, hard drive, RAM sticks, and keyboard.
When you start taking your old electronics apart with reuse in mind, stop thinking about what device isn’t working and start thinking about what components do work. Aside from recent software, the same tablet that won’t boot up tends to have just as functional components as the one you’re using to read this right now.
Smartphones hold useful rare earth magnets, high-quality speakers, tablets have screens large enough to be kitchen recipe displays long after they can run modern apps, and old laptops have adjustable screens that become external monitors with the right connection cables.
Remember that extending the life of an electronic device by repairing it doesn’t just reduce waste, it saves energy. A laptop repaired to extend its lifespan by just 3 years is estimated to cut emissions by 50 percent (Right to Repair Europe). Upcycling has the potential to be even better because it doesn’t require the entire device to work, just the components inside it that still function.
Broken smartphones make excellent music players with built-in speakers, wall-mounted tablets can be permanent photo frames or home automation control panels, laptop screens turn into high-quality secondary monitors long after laptops become unusable. And none of these repurposed electronics needs to worry about toxic heavy metals since we’re not shredding them to recover gold. That’s what recycling facilities are for.
But first, you have to learn what you can do with what you’ve got.
## The Building Blocks of Electronics Upcycling
| Source Device | Best Components | Typical Cost to Extract | Primary Uses | Skill Needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Laptops | Screen, hard drive, RAM, speakers | £0-30 | Secondary monitors, external storage, speakers | Basic |
| Tablets | Screen, battery, speakers | £10-40 | Digital frames, home automation interfaces | Basic |
| Smartphones | Camera, battery, speakers, sensors | £5-25 | Security cameras, dedicated MP3 players, sensors | Basic to advanced |
| Desktop PCs | Power supplies, fans, drives, case | £0-20 | Parts for custom builds, DIY storage servers | Intermediate |
**Old Laptop Screens: Everyone’s favorite upcycling opportunity. Tablets with dead screens or unusable software become some of the highest quality secondary displays you can find. Mount them on your wall or slap a laptop stand on that old tablet to put it to work.
Size matters less for tablet as secondary displays than laptops because you’re rarely going to find a new tablet with a larger display than something purchased 5-10 years ago. Compatibility with your desktop hardware determines the best choice: most laptops support HDMI inputs on modern hardware. You’ll need USB-to-Thunderbolt cables for MacBooks that support external displays.
Prices for laptop mounts start at £15 and max out around £40 for models with height adjustment. Attachment method and wall material determine appropriate screws and anchors. Nearly all mounts let you angle the screen for comfortable viewing and many have rotation to switch between landscape and portrait orientation.
Using old laptops as monitors requires you connect both video signal and power supply. USB-C to HDMI adapters work well for modern machines. In addition to laptop screens specifically, any tablet or smartphone with a decent quality display and the ability to stay plugged into power is a candidate for becoming a secondary monitor or useful dedicated display. **
**Speakers: Tablet and laptop speakers frequently offer better sound quality than their size suggests, especially for voice reproduction. Laptops especially are designed to be used in meeting rooms and lecture halls so expect clear audio even at moderate volumes. **
Extracting the speakers from laptops or tablets is a straightforward soldering project that yields parts for some pretty interesting custom audio solutions. Bluetooth audio receivers are available for as little as £10 that let you turn any set of speakers into wireless speakers. Want to build a desktop audio system? Pick up multiple old laptops with speakers and build a custom speaker array.
Old tablets and smartphones also make excellent battery-powered audio systems. The battery management systems in smartphones and tablets do all the heavy lifting of providing the correct voltage through USB. Dismantle one of your old devices with non-functioning screen and you’ve got yourself a high-quality amplifier and portable battery that can power your custom speakers for hours. Expect a 2 hour reduction in useful lifespan per year the battery isn’t changed (~30 year battery life).
**Storage: Hard drives and solid state storage don’t degrade, they simply stop working at some point. A 500GB hard drive from a failed laptop is a 500GB external storage device with a USB enclosure. Large USB 3.0 enclosures cost between £15 and £25 giving you desktop-class storage capacity for far less than buying new.
Or feed multiple old hard drives into a Raspberry Pi single board computer and build your own Network Attached Storage device. The Raspberry Pi community has developed everything from automated backup systems to media streaming servers using old laptops and desktop PCs as cost-effective NAS systems.
RAM from old laptops can often be extracted and used in other laptops or PCs. Desktop RAM has near universal compatibility these days, but older laptop RAM sticks can still be useful for repairs or refurbishing similar generation machines. **
Older smartphones and tablets also make fantastic dedicated computers. A slow older smartphone that struggles with current app stores will run older versions of Spotify or music apps wonderfully well. Your previous generation tablet that’s too slow for video makes an incredible e-reader for cloud stored PDFs and e-books.
**Cameras and Other Sensors: Want a high-quality security camera but hate paying Ring and Nest prices? Old smartphones have cameras that are several generations beyond what you’ll find in most security cameras at the same price point. With the right software, an old smartphone can be repurposed into a security camera with built in wireless and battery backup.
You can harvest accelerometers, gyroscopes, light sensors, and magnetometers from smartphones with enough technical knowledge. For most people, it’s far easier to use the phone as a complete package. Screwing an old phone into place with access to power lets you build a security camera system using devices you were otherwise going to throw away. ***Smartphone cameras are also useful for DIY machine vision projects. Add a basic Pi camera mount to Raspberry Pi single board computers and your old smartphones can function as powerful computer vision sensors. Harvesting components requires soldering skills, whereas using old smartphones or tablets whole only requires you can follow instructions. ***
## Electronics Upcycling Doesn’t
| Don’t bother upcycling … |
|---|
| Your broken stuff. This should be obvious, but doesn’t apply to everything on this list. |
| Devices without removable batteries. See above. While some tech lends itself better to upcycling than others, the rule of thumb here is that if you’re swapping out batteries on a regular basis, it’s upcyclable. Repairable is less certain. |
| Any tech you’re sentimental about. Got a laptop you upgraded multiple times but always hated selling? Keep it! But if it still works, donate it instead of upgrading. Odds are somewhere someone could put that hardware to excellent use. This doesn’t mean working tech you’re just attached to because it was “good back in the day”. Actual nostalgia. |
| Things that are expensive to fix. That old Windows PC keeps crashing because you’ve updated past what Windows 7 can handle? It’s time to retire it. Doesn’t matter if the hardware is perfectly good. Things that don’t work are rarely upcyclable. |
## Why You Should Upcycle Old Electronics: Research and Data
{% expand “Data behind these claims?” %}
Energy and emissions reductions from reuse and repair over manufacturing new devices.
Recycling one million laptops saves enough energy to power 3,500 homes for a year. (Environmental Protection Agency)
Repairs that extend lifetime by 3 years cut emissions by 50 percent. (Right to Repair EU)
Rates of growth for domestic e-waste production.
E-waste is the fastest growing domestic waste stream in the world. (UNEP)
E-waste growth rates are expected to continue outstripping formal recycling rates. (Our World In Data)
Expected increase in global electronics consumption.
Global electronics consumption is growing between 3 and 4 percent per year. (OECD)
Value lost through disposal vs. formal recycling rates.
Only 22 percent of global e-waste is properly recycled each year. (UNITAR)
Globally, the materials recovered from recycling electronics have a total retail value of more than $62 billion annually. (World Economic Forum)
Ratio of potentially useful devices vs devices properly recycled.
We discard functional smartphones at a rate of 52 percent in the US, higher than any other type of consumer tech device. (The Restart Project)
{% endexpand %}
## Conclusion
This guide is just the beginning of what’s possible with used electronics. Some of the best upcycling projects are things we haven’t thought of yet, built with parts laid aside from older tutorials and experiments. Over time your skills will improve and your ability to extract more complex parts will grow.
Our advice is to start small, learn basic skills, and build from there. Don’t throw out non-working tech, but use it to practice disassembly and rehearse upgrades until you feel comfortable cracking open devices that still work. There’s no need to rush into taking apart your only working smartphone. Build confidence over time.
## About The Author
Nick Fresard is a writer and composer based in Manchester. His first book Teardown was published on Kindle in February, 2022.
https://laptopgardener.com/self-care-with-tech-the-complete-beginners-guide-to-upcycling-electronics
