Join the fight for the right to repair. Manufacturers (I’m looking at you, Apple) have been removing the ability of end users to repair their own stuff and making it more difficult for independent repair shops to do their jobs. Repairing stuff goes a long way in keeping electronics out of land fills.

But repairing can be understood as “reusing”, but there’s a first step before reusing, it’s reducing. Basically, stop buying shit that you don’t need. If you don’t buy it, it won’t be manufactured, so it won’t end up as e-waste.

If people minded more the reduce and reuse, recycling wouldn’t be as needed.

Reintroducing removable cell phone batteries is a big start, and ending this shitty culture around buying a new phone every 2 years that is functionally identical to your existing phone.

Take care of your charging cables especially if they are longer because the 10 ft or longer ones are very easy to break

Cables should not

Store lithium battery(most things) powered items at 50% charge or higher when in long term storage

Let your device reach zero percent then charge to 100% so the device can accurately measure your battery health

As batteries get older they reduce in power so a large part of a device slowing with age is the battery being slow so if notice increased performance when plugged in to a then maybe a battery replacement instead of a new device can fix your problems

Computers need to be cleaned of dust every once in a while so if you have high fan noise or high temperatures then try cleaning

If you have a lightning charging cable Do not let your finger or any other conductive material cover the entire charging face of an apple charging cable this will cause that side of the cable to break to avoid injuring or otherwise causing damage

Avoid buying old cables if you don’t have any yourself there are many people that have boxes of old cables they no longer have uses for

Usb-c is going to fully take over most likely so buy more than you need for the future devices which will use them

Buy good Usb-c power adapters(wall box) and cables, In the future with both laptops and phones being able to charge from the same cable both the power supply and cable need to be up to the task of charging a laptop and any fast charging phones this means thicker cables and high watt power adapters Usb-a(rectangle) charges slower than usb-c so dont buy usb-c cables with one end being usb-a and expect it to charge anything other than a phone or other smaller devices

If you dont use your laptop battery much there can be an option to not use the battery and instead just use the charger as a power supply until disconected you can see these and many other options through the bios

Tell your local government that when they plan out for a new program to double whatever the real number is going to be in terms of volume.

Seen a few of these programs fail because they didn’t size the process enough. The only risk of going over is more upfront cost. Long term if everything is running undercapacity you will get more years and a lot less downtime.

Full disclosure I directly benefit from these programs.

I am doing my part by hoarding Sony trinitrons and PVMs.