By the Bin Night Tonight team · Updated July 2026
The drawer of dead phones, the TV in the garage, the box of mystery cables. Electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the country, and it is also one of the easiest to do right, because the drop offs are free and the metals inside are genuinely worth recovering.
Electronics combine materials worth recovering (copper, gold, aluminium, rare earths) with materials that should never reach landfill (lead, mercury, cadmium, flame retardants) and, increasingly, lithium batteries that start fires in trucks and tips. Victoria banned all e-waste from landfill and from kerbside bins in 2019, South Australia and the ACT have long standing bans, and councils elsewhere direct e-waste away from bins regardless of a formal ban.
Practically: nothing with a plug, cord or battery should go in any kerbside bin, anywhere in Australia. The question is only which free channel takes it.
Under the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme, manufacturers and importers fund free recycling for televisions, computers, laptops, monitors, printers, keyboards, mice and computer parts. Drop off points include council transfer stations, some retailers and scheduled council collection events, and the service is free for households.
Officeworks stores accept computers, laptops, cables, phones and accessories at their in store recycling stations, and JB Hi-Fi and other retailers run take back for some categories. For phones specifically, MobileMuster collects at phone retailers and by free reply post, and has run for over two decades.
Kettles, toasters, hair dryers, power tools, game consoles, modems, Christmas lights: these fall outside the TV and computer scheme but are accepted as general e-waste at council transfer stations and resource recovery centres, usually free for household quantities. Councils also run periodic e-waste drop off days, and community recycling centres in most metro areas take the lot.
Whitegoods are their own stream: fridges, washing machines and dryers are accepted at transfer stations (sometimes with a small fee for degassing fridges), collected through council hard rubbish in most areas, and often taken back free by retailers delivering a replacement. Scrap metal dealers take washing machines and dryers free, since they are mostly steel.
Anything with storage deserves five minutes of caution before it leaves the house. Sign out of accounts, then factory reset phones, tablets and laptops. For computers, a factory reset or disk wipe matters more than people expect; recyclers shred drives, but the device may pass through several hands first. If a device is too dead to wipe, physically removing the drive from a laptop takes one screwdriver, and a dead phone that will not power on is a low risk item in practice.
Working electronics are worth more un-recycled: charities, buy nothing groups and refurbishers extend a device's life, which beats even perfect recycling. Recycle the genuinely dead, rehome the merely outdated.
No. In Victoria, SA and the ACT it is prohibited, and everywhere else councils direct e-waste to drop offs. Even battery free electronics contain metals and boards worth recovering, and transfer stations take them free.
Your council website lists its transfer station and any e-waste events; Officeworks covers computers and phones in most suburbs. Recycling Near You (run by Planet Ark) has a national locator by postcode and item type.
Cables are e-waste and are accepted at the same drop offs, including Officeworks in store stations. Copper recovery from cables is one of the better yields in the stream, so the mystery cable box is worth the trip.