OKdo program will recycle your old Pi and give you £10 voucher

OKdo program will recycle your old Pi and give you £10 voucher

Jul 28, 2021 — by Eric Brown

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OKdo, Sony, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation have launched an “OKdo Renew” recycling program that will exchange your old RPi 3 and 4 boards and give you a £10 OKdo voucher. Meanwhile, RPi’s Eben Upton says the next Pi will likely be a RPi 4A due in 2022.

The tech industry likes to talk a lot about the growing problem of electronic waste, but progress in establishing recycling programs has been slow. Globally, electronic waste reached a record high of 53.6 million metric tons in 2019 and only 17.4 percent of e-waste was recycled, according to Statista.

To increase recycling of the Raspberry Pi, British tech retailer OKdo has joined with Sony Technology and the Raspberry Pi Foundation to launch an OKdo Renew recycling program. Starting now in the UK, with plans for a global launch by the end of the year, the program allows owners of the Raspberry Pi 3B (pictured below), RPi 3B+ (pictured at top), and RPi 4B SBCs to send in their Pi boards. In exchange they receive a £10 voucher, which can be redeemed on OKdo purchases of over £15 within 30 days. The boards must be “in working order when connected to a power supply.”

Pi owners in the UK can sign up now to receive a pre-paid postage label and a voucher offer code. Users are responsible for removing memory cards before shipping them in a padded envelope.

The boards will be tested, reconditioned, and renewed at the Sony Technology Centre in South Wales. Some will be donated while others will be resold at a discount by OKdo. The Electrocomponents-owned retailer will offer a 1-year warranty for the pre-owned boards and ship the boards in recycled packaging. OKdo will also make a donation to the Raspberry Pi Foundation for each pre-owned board that it sells.

There is no electronic component recycling involved. Received boards that are not deemed OKdo worthy will be “disposed of.” In that case, it is unclear if the users would still be able to redeem their vouchers. You can send more than one Pi, but you only get the single voucher.

“Over 40 million Raspberry Pi computers have been sold since 2012, and the vast majority of these remain in working order, even after their owners have upgraded to more recent versions,” stated Eben Upton, Founder & CEO at Raspberry Pi. “Managed reuse of these surplus units provides an avenue to further reduce our environmental footprint, and we welcome this exciting new initiative from OKdo and Sony.”

OKdo did not mention suggested pricing for the refurbished boards, which are likely to be mostly RPi 3/3+ models. As noted in the EENewsEurope post where the program was announced, the program may help to alleviate a shortage of Raspberry Pi’s caused by the global chip shortage.

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Upton suggests 2022 launch for RPi 4A, but probably not for RPi 5

Last week, Tom’s Hardware’s The Pi Cast podcast interviewed Upton, who said the stripped-down Raspberry Pi 4 Model A would probably have shipped by now if not for the chip shortage. The Raspberry Pi 4 A is now planned for 2022, but Upton hinted that unless the chip shortage ends sooner than expected, a Raspberry Pi 5 launch may not happen until 2023.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model A will update the $20 Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, which offers a smaller, less feature-rich alternative to the RPi 3B+, but with the same processor. The 4A will likely follow the same formula, but at a $25 price.

To reduce costs, Upton said they would likely remove one of the two mini-HDMI ports, possibly switching it to full size. There is also a good chance they will dispense with the USB 3.0 ports of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B to avoid the cost of the PCIe-driven VL805 USB 3.0 controller, leaving an unspecified number of USB 2.0 ports. (The 3A+ has one.) Upton added that they had not yet decided to provide a PCIe interface on its own, as was done with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

Also slotted for a possible 2022 appearance is an update to the Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen. Although Upton said that Raspberry Pi was not currently working on a Raspberry Pi 5 design, it will likely have a faster processor, support for more than 8GB RAM, a faster USB port (i.e. USB 3.2 Gen2 or USB 4.0), 2.5GbE Ethernet, and faster WiFi (probably 802.11ax/Wi-Fi 6).

Further information

More information on the OKdo Renew launch in the UK may be found in the OKdo Renew website.