Recycling credit

Looks like Europe has made it a lot more difficult to dispose of your old credit card than the debt that’s on it …

With my current credit card being set to expire soon, the bank recently sent me a replacement one to helpfully enable me to keep maintaining their bottom line in the future. Being bored (or braindead, your choice), I made the mistake of reading through the instructions that came with the new card. In addition to the usual advice to destroy your credit card like a ninja on acid and speed to keep your information safe, there was also something new. After having made the sushi, you were no longer allowed to dispose of all the bits in the normal household waste because the chip and all the what-not in the card meant that it now officially counts as electrical waste. As such, the card had to be disposed of separately as if it were an old mobile phone or a TV. The new card even has the appropriate (and extremely ugly) symbol to indicate this.

(Funnily enough, the current EU regulations define a lot of things as electrical waste, but not credit cards specifically. Presumably they must fall under the rather all-inclusive “and other products and equipment for the collection, storage, processing, presentation or communication of information by electronic means” for IT and Telecommunications Equipment in Annex II.)

Problem is, electrical waste is not really all that easy to recycle. Paper, yes. Plastic? Even though they burn most of it anyway, also not a problem. Even batteries are relatively easy. But not electrical waste. A quick search through the City of Not-Bielefeld webpages did, however, reveal two general-purpose recycling centres (or what we used to call city dumps when I was a kid) “conveniently located close to you.” Now, if there is one thing that is thankfully true about most (working) dumps, it is that they are usually not conveniently close to anything and especially not where people live. The same is the case here in Not-Bielefeld, where the two dumps are about 8 and 12 km (and usually downwind at that) from where I live.

So, if we want to do this by the book, this being Germany and all, me being environmentally friendly translates out into a minimum 16-km car ride. That works out to about 0.8 l of diesel or about 1.30 EUR at today’s overinflated, no-the-oil-companies-are-not-using-the-war-in-the-Ukraine-as-yet-another-excuse-to-further-gouge-us oil prices. Alternatively, I could hop on the bus to the tune of 5.40 EUR for a 90-minute round trip.

All for one expired credit card …

True, I could save up all my electrical waste to make the trip worth it and have been doing this for about five years now. Even after all that time, the “pile” still only consists of two USB cables and one set of dead headphones. And now one old credit card on top of that. Still not worth the trip.

Fortunately, only my new credit card has that special symbol, which means that I can throw the shrapnel of my old card into the normal trash with a clear conscience, right? And, in five years time, if I do it right, technically the only piece of the then old card that has to be properly recycled is the bit with that ugly symbol on it …