Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on What Hi-Fi?
Whether you are a casual music lover or a hardcore audiophile, most of us are guilty of buying a new pair of headphones or wireless earbuds when we know there are old ones gathering dust in a drawer.
But there is a way of putting them to use after they have stopped being an item we reach for every day, as we discovered talking to JLab.
Why does it matter?
Recycle Your Electricals reports that if we all recycled our small unwanted electricals instead of binning them, we could save 7.98 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Electronics can be filled with hazardous chemicals such as lead, mercury, and cadmium. So, when we simply throw them out, they end up in landfills and potentially leak into our water supply and ecosystem.
In an effort to make recycling more accessible, headphone brand JLab has introduced a scheme where customers can take earbuds, headphones, or speakers of any brand and “properly dispose of them”.
Once you send the product to JLab, you will also get a code to save 50 percent on the company’s website.
Founder of the Circular Design Institute, Elaine Butler, told us that electronic companies “need to design their products to be easy to repair and upgrade”.
She added that this is achieved by “making goods easy-to-disassemble, which would have the knock-off benefit of also making it easier to fully recycle all components of their products at the end of their working life”.
We spoke to the CEO of JLab, Win Cramer, to learn more about the company’s program.
Humble beginnings
Cramer tells us that when the scheme was put in place around ten years ago, the company was still relatively unknown.
“As electronics were becoming more and more part of our day-to-day lives, we could see stuff being thrown away within our own offices,” he says.
“We were like, holy cow, this could be a problem. How can we help the environment in any way we can?”
For JLab, it offered a dual incentive as it gave customers a place to put their unwanted technology, as well as giving them a reason to come to the company in the first place.
In the early days of the scheme, the idea was that customers could give in their headphones and they would be sold again, but the brand found that people don’t like used headphones.
“It’s kind of like how people don’t like used shoes,” says Cramer. “We would get so much waste out of the headphones that we were repairing, and that would then go in the trash.”
Making something new
Now JLab works with three or four different recycling organizations that take in the goods to their return warehouses.
If a product is truly broken, the disassembly process begins: “We send plastics to our plastic recyclers, and PCB boards to our PCB recyclers.”
Magnets are sent back into the supply chain because they can be reused relatively quickly.
JLab also buys some of these recycled materials to go back into the company’s supply chain. Cramer says that 20 to 40 per cent of their products are made from recycled plastics.
In terms of the right to repair laws we mentioned earlier, Cramer says there are upcoming plans to be announced at CES 2026 that will clarify how the company will meet the European targets.
“Products will be designed to, in theory, last longer if the individual is willing to put the effort in to repair it,” he tells us.
Customers will be able to repair the drivers, cases, and headphones themselves to make the product last longer. Batteries will also be replaceable, a key feature considering it is often the first component to die.
Cramer adds with a slight smile: “What I like is everyone has some skin in the game, we are all part of the world.”
About the Author
Robyn Quick is a Staff Writer for What Hi Fi?. After graduating from Cardiff University with a postgraduate degree in magazine journalism, they have worked for a variety of film and culture publications. In their spare time, Robyn can be found playing board games too competitively, going on cinema trips, and learning Muay Thai.
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