E-Waste, Clothing & Plastic: How Google Supports Recycling

Globally, only 22% of e-waste is collected and recycled in a sustainable way.

It is expected that, by 2030, the world will produce around 82 million tonnes of electronic waste that puts valuable materials, including gold and lithium, into landfill. 

“One of the biggest barriers to proper electronics recycling is simply knowing where and how to do it,” explains Robert Little, Sustainability Strategy Lead for gTech at Google. 

“Of course, to truly embrace a circular economy, we need to go beyond simply recycling. It's about thinking holistically about the entire lifecycle of our devices.”

Google’s “recycling attribute” feature aims to support its users in finding recycling services through Google business profiles.

How do Google’s recycling attributes work?

Recycling attributes are a way of letting customers know that a business offers recycling drop-off services and shows a business’s commitment to sustainability. 

Businesses can choose to display one of multiple of these categories of recycling attribute so customers can easily understand where to best recycle their waste. 

These attributes will appear on a Google Business Profile that show up in Google searches and on Google Maps. 

Businesses can edit the recycling attributes displayed on their profile and customers can suggest edits through Maps and Search. 

Google recycling attributes in practice

A clothing swap business in Glasgow, Scotland called R:evolve Recycle was highlighted by Google as a user of its recycling attributes. 

The charity shop was first opened by a group of volunteers in 2015 and has since evolved into three stores in and around Glasgow. 

Customers can exchange old clothes for previously donated items, making sustainable fashion choices easier. 

As of 2022, the shop had prevented more than 41,000kg of clothing going to landfill and saved 869.8 tonnes of CO₂. 

When searching for “clothing recycling in Glasgow” through Google, businesses with the clothing recycling attribute are displayed, such as R:evolve. 

What else is Google doing to support recycling?

Google aims to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, including through designing out waste and pollution. 

The Single-Use Plastics Challenge, launched in 2023, invited food and beverage companies to share solutions for reducing the industry’s plastic use. 

Google selected nine companies to test their ideas in the company’s US campus cafes and kitchens. 

In 2016, the company announced its aim to achieve zero waste to landfill for all its global data centre operations. 

In 2023 it diverted 78% of operational waste from disposal across its global fleet of Google owned and operated data centres and eight out of 28 achieved the goal. 

More than 44 million hardware components from Google’s data centres have been resold into the secondary market since 2015. 

Google also joined forces with Amazon, Apple, Dell and Microsoft in 2021 to partner with electronics recycling company Retrievr for a pilot where e-waste was collected from doorsteps in Colorado, USA. 

“Globally, only about 20% of post-consumer e-waste ever makes it to the recycling stream,” says David Bourne, Google Consumer Hardware’s Sustainability Strategist. 

“A lot of recycled materials are currently coming from post-industrial recycled content, which has a naturally limited scope of availability. As demand for recycled materials in products increases, post-industrial recycled scrap is not going to be enough to fulfil that.”

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