UK customers could be saving over £18.8 billion by extending device lifecycles
A new study by Asurion Europe assesses the financial and environmental impact of investing in home tech protection. The research found that each UK customer could be saving over £400 on average by investing in tech cover and extending the life of smartphones, tablets or laptops by a year.
Based on this calculation, the UK population could be saving over £18.8 billion by prolonging the lifetime of devices for an additional year and remembering to trade in their devices at the end of that year. This is equivalent to ten times the Government’s latest home energy efficiency boosting grant or just a little less than the Chancellor’s 2023 funding announcement for carbon capture, utilisation and storage.
Additionally, extending lifetime by a year reduces the carbon footprint of manufacturing replacement devices by an average 99 kilos CO2e per person, which scales up to over 4.5 million tonnes CO2e across the nation. This is equivalent to 0.9% of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
However, a range of factors are holding customers back from extending device life, including the cost or inconvenience of repair, a lack of awareness of how to dispose of e-waste responsibly, or simply the desire to stay up to date with the latest models. With e-waste one of the fastest growing waste streams globally and the UK generating the second-highest amount of e-waste per person, convenient and effective solutions for device repair and disposal are crucial.
Gavin Miller, CEO, Asurion Europe comments, “Given our reliance on technology and our extensive use of digital products, we need to be savvier as a society about how to responsibly replace or dispose of devices. Tech protection can comprehensively cover device maintenance, installation, optimisation, repair and trade-in options – saving customers a neat sum while reducing environmental footprint. This is especially helpful in the current economic circumstances, as we all aim to make our money go further.”
