I have some old, broken electronic items, phones, chargers etc. Does anyone know anywhere in town to recycle them? Or am I best to give them to little family electronic shops who might be able to repair them/find some use?

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Thought I'd try this one more time. I'd like to organize a community drop-off point where people can bring stuff like this and I can ship it to a proper recycling facility. But so far I have not been able to track down a reputable company. Any ideas would be great appreciated.

I wonder if giving them to the little family electronic shops might be more practical - seems to me that perhaps such shops actually would use such items and that this would be fairly efficient recycling.

I saw a report on TV last year. The proper recycling facilities pay less fro scrap items, and it usually ends up at the dirty end of the recycle market.
If things are not broken, like chargers, they will often be re-purposed.

Putting in your bin at your xiaoqu will usually do the job, as the workers route out anything of value and feed it into the re-use and recycle chain.

There was an article about anonymous used clothes drop off. Turned into a garbage dump of used unwashed soiled clothes and underpants. If you get your worthwhile endeavor going, make sure to be clear on drop off rules.

Most recycling is individual to mompop shop, and non of it looks reputable. But I'm happy all the bottles I toss never get buried in a landfill, and the pensioners can make a few rmb.

Tigertiger and OP have the correct idea. Dump it in the xiao qu bins or donate to small repair shops. Large scale electronics recycling in China is not about reuse. It's about burning the circuit boards in open barrels for the trace metals. Not as bad a battery breaking in Bangladesh but pretty toxic to land, air, and human still.

There is a service called "Banana Peel" www.xiangjiaopi.com/ serving Beijing and some other larger cities that claims to have more environmentally responsible channels...but who knows. And anyway it's not available in Kunming.

It's also a problem with recycling in other places, too. In the US if the commodity price for some type of plastic or whatever drops too low, it just starts getting landfilled with the rest of the garbage.

Anyway, I will probably still try to put something together that inserts these items a little further up the chain than the "leave it next to the bins in the xiaoqu and hope somebody collects it" approach (which, by the way, I think is definitely better than mixing it in with the rest of the garbage). I figure it's worthwhile even if means that only a fractionally higher volume gets repurposed or recycled.

Best wishes Dan. My impression is that somebody - probably poor - does collect it from next to the bins, and that leads to a useful bowl of rice for somebody. I don't know where it ends up next, tho.