The Drawer of Cables to Machines I No Longer Own

The drawer is the second one down in the kitchen, beneath the one that holds the takeaway menus and the spare birthday candles, and it is not, strictly speaking, a drawer of cables. It is a drawer of cables and a drawer of other things: a dead AA battery, a plastic key for a lock that no longer exists, a small screwdriver with a chipped orange handle, a warranty card for a kettle that was replaced in 2019. But the cables are the reason the drawer resists being sorted. Everything else could be tipped into the bin in nine seconds. The cables require decisions.

There is a figure-of-eight lead, the kind that once fed a portable CD player. There is a thin white USB cable with a proprietary connector at one end, a connector I recognise but cannot name, belonging to a phone I remember holding but cannot place in a year. There is a length of coaxial cable, stiff and pale grey, that has not been connected to anything since the digital switchover. There is a black power supply with a barrel jack, and on the side of the power supply a small printed label that says 9V, 1.5A, centre positive, and no indication whatsoever of what it powered. There is a tangle of earphone wire, the flat kind that used to come free with a handset, and a short HDMI cable that is too short to be useful and too well made to throw away.

None of these cables is broken. That is the first thing to understand about the drawer. It is not a graveyard. It is a waiting room.

What the drawer actually stores

The unspoken rule of the drawer is that nothing in it is rubbish. Rubbish is a category with a clear boundary: the thing is broken, the thing is finished, the thing has no second life. The drawer holds only things that might still have a second life, and the cables are the purest expression of that principle, because a cable is almost never the thing that fails. The device fails. The cable outlives it. So the cable is kept, on the reasonable grounds that cables are interchangeable, that the next device might need one, and that throwing away a working cable is a small but real waste.

This is not a moral failing. It is a reasonable inference from a true premise. The problem is that the inference is never tested. The drawer is not a plan to repair anything. It is a postponement, and postponement has a way of looking like prudence from the outside.

Research on why households keep unused electrical equipment suggests this is common. A survey of 8,775 households across several European countries and Lebanon, coordinated through the WEEE Forum and reported by UNITAR researchers, found that the most commonly cited reason for keeping unused electrical and electronic equipment was the belief that the item might be useful again in the future, given by 46% of respondents. Plans to sell or give the item away accounted for 15%, sentimental attachment for 13%, and the belief that the item might increase in value for 9%. A small share, 7%, said they simply did not know how to dispose of the item properly. The European Environment Agency, drawing on a survey of more than 8,000 European households, reports the same 13% figure for emotional attachment, and names the kinds of objects involved: headphones, remote controls, clocks, phones.

Those figures are European, not specific to Sheffield, and they concern electrical equipment rather than cables alone. But they describe the drawer accurately enough. The dominant motive is future usefulness. The sentimental motive is real but smaller. And the two are easy to confuse, because from the outside a drawer of cables looks the same whichever motive put them there.

Two kinds of keeping

It is worth separating them, because the essay’s temptation is to treat the drawer as one thing, and it is not.

Keeping a cable because it might be useful is a practical act. It has a logic, even if the logic is never checked. Keeping a cable because it belonged to a particular machine, and that machine belonged to a particular year, is a different act entirely. The first is a small bet on the future. The second is a small attachment to the past. They sit in the same drawer, and they are not the same decision.

The test I have found useful is simple, and it is not a rule I am recommending to anyone else so much as a way of telling the two apart. If I cannot name the device a cable belongs to without handling it, the cable has already stopped being a tool and become an artefact. The figure-of-eight lead is still a tool: I know what it does, and I know that a future radio or lamp might need one. The white proprietary cable is an artefact. I know the shape of the connector. I do not know the phone. It has crossed a line without my noticing, and the drawer has become, for that cable, a small museum with no labels.

What would actually happen

The practical question is not whether the cables are useful. It is what would happen if they left the house.

In Sheffield, household waste can be taken to any of the city’s five Household Waste Recycling Centres, at Beighton Road in Woodhouse, Blackstock Road in Gleadless, Greaves Lane in High Green, Longley Avenue West in Shirecliffe, and Manchester Road in Deepcar. The council’s page for the sites states that materials brought to them will be sent for re-use or recycling wherever possible. The Veolia page listing what each site accepts includes electrical and electronic equipment among the materials taken, alongside scrap metal, household batteries and fluorescent tubes. The sites have height barriers of 1.8 metres, operate winter hours from October to March, and each closes on one or two days of the week, so a trip requires a small amount of planning rather than a spontaneous detour.

That is the whole of the practical answer. The cables could go into a box, the box could go into the boot, and the box could be handed over at a site that accepts electrical and electronic equipment. Nothing about this is difficult. What makes it difficult is not logistics. It is the small administrative weight of deciding, cable by cable, which ones are tools and which are artefacts, and then accepting that the artefacts are not going to become tools again.

I have not yet made the trip. That is worth saying plainly, because the temptation in an essay like this is to end with the boot full of cables and the drawer empty and the narrator somehow improved. That is not what happens. What happens is that the drawer is opened, a few cables are lifted out, one or two are recognised, and the rest are put back because the decision has not been made. The trip is not a redemption arc. It is an administrative act, and it can wait until the administration is actually done.

Archive or backlog

The distinction worth keeping is not between useful and useless cables. It is between an archive and a backlog.

An archive is kept deliberately. It knows what it holds. If I wanted the drawer to be an archive, I would need to label the cables, or at least group them, and write on a strip of masking tape what each one fed and when. That would take an afternoon. It would also mean admitting that some of the cables are kept for reasons that have nothing to do with future use, and that those reasons are allowed, as long as they are named.

A backlog is kept by default. It has no inventory. It grows by addition and shrinks only by accident. Most drawers of cables are backlogs, and the reason they feel heavy is not the weight of the copper. It is the weight of the unmade decisions, each one small enough to defer and none of them deferred on purpose.

The drawer does not need to be emptied to stop being a backlog. It needs to be known. A cable that has been named and kept is a different object from a cable that has been kept because it was there. The first is a small act of attention. The second is just the passage of time, coiled up and pushed to the back.

So the drawer stays, for now, with its figure-of-eight lead and its unlabelled power supply and its white proprietary cable that belongs to a phone I can almost remember. It is not a moral crisis. It is a small domestic archive of deferred decisions, and the most useful thing I can do with it is not to empty it but to open it, once, and find out what is actually in there.

Questions readers ask

Can I put old cables in my kerbside recycling bin?

Sheffield City Council’s recycling-centre pages describe the Household Waste Recycling Centres as the route for electrical and electronic equipment; they do not describe a kerbside collection for small electrical items. Cables should go to a site that accepts electrical and electronic equipment rather than into a paper or plastics bin.

Do the Sheffield sites accept small electrical items as well as large appliances?

The Veolia listing for the sites includes electrical and electronic equipment among accepted materials, alongside white goods and scrap metal. The council states that materials brought to the sites will be sent for re-use or recycling wherever possible.

Is it worth keeping a cable ‘just in case’?

Sometimes. The survey evidence suggests future usefulness is the most common reason people give for keeping unused electricals, and a working cable is a reasonable thing to keep if you can name what it fits. The difficulty is that the ‘just in case’ reason and the sentimental reason look identical in a drawer, so the useful test is whether you can identify the device without handling the cable.

What about the environmental case for clearing it out?

Waste electrical and electronic equipment contains materials that can be recovered, and the European Environment Agency notes that hoarding in households is one of the bottlenecks in meeting collection targets. That is a general policy point, not a reason to feel personally indicted by a drawer. The practical case for taking the cables to a recycling centre is simply that they will be handled as electrical waste rather than as general rubbish.

Sources

• UNITAR / WEEE Forum household survey findings, reported at futuram.eu/hoarding-of-weee.
• European Environment Agency, Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) collection rate indicator.
• Sheffield City Council, Household waste recycling centres.
• Veolia Sheffield, Household Waste Recycling Centres.