About a hundred mainly retired volunteers operate a not-for-profit out of Waipa, sifting through discarded household electronics, essentially mining junk for stuff that can be salvaged.
They currently divert between 24 and 25 tonnes of electronic waste going to landfill each year.
But Urban Miners chairperson Mark Hanlon told Checkpoint it was only a fraction of what they would like to be doing.
"We've recruited a team of volunteers, mainly retirees, who have come in and dismantled these items and developed a great deal of expertise in doing that," he said.
"They've often brought excellent skills with them to do that, but we've all learned a tremendous amount as we've gone along.
"And the result is that we have a team that are now working very, very efficiently and we've almost created this huge hungry beast that we're having a little bit of difficulty keeping it fed."
Hanlon said the team do public collections twice a month - in Cambridge and Te Awamutu - as well as commercial collections.
And while they do not have a facility to people to drop off their electronic waste, they will pick them up for a small fee.
"Most of our charges are below $10. There's one or two items that are relatively expensive because we don't actually dismantle those ourselves. We actually send them to another company we deal with in Auckland who actually do dismantle them."
But manufacturers should "undoubtedly" be taking responsibility for all the waste that is being produced, Hanlon added.
And he is calling for product stewardship legislation.
"That will require importers and retailers of new products to pay a small levy, which would then go to the Ministry for the Environment.
"The Ministry for the Environment would then pay out to accredited recyclers for undertaking the process of dismantling and recovering the products."
