Special Report: Pay-as-you-recycle PCs

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 24 Oct 2002 at 12:46

The price of a PC has been dropping steadily over the last few years, but an EU Directive may mean you have to pay a little bit more so that your computer can be safely disposed of.

What it is

The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive and the Restriction of Hazardous Substances proposal seek to re-use electronic waste - through recycling and environmentally-friendly disposal - to the tune of 4kg per household per year by the end of 2006. And they will ban four heavy metals.

Pia Ahrenkilde, spokesperson for the Environment for the EC, told us: 'The Directive makes producers responsible for their own waste... It gives an obligation to producers to financially guarantee the recycling of their products.'

The Directive requires producers to recover 75 per cent of goods taken back for disposal and to re-use 70 per cent of those goods.

Ahrenkilde said there would be incentives both for manufacturers to produce more environmentally friendly machines and for consumers to buy them.

Large corporate producers will be expected to come up with their own shemes, but some governments (including the UK's) are fighting for the inclusion of communal processes for smaller companies that would find the cost of setting up their own systems prohibitive.

Producers will be responsible for collecting their product from a central point, and not necessarily from customers' doorsteps. Alternatively local councils may be involved in collection.

It is also possible that high street retailers may become the link between customer and producer. Customers would be able to take equipment back to the shop from which they bought it, and for the shop to then pass it on to the producer to dispose of.

However, retailers are not so keen. They say they don't have the space to store that amount of goods and that returned goods present hygiene hazards.

Mixed reception

While the industry has not welcomed the Directive with open arms, it has been supportive. Ahrenkilde tells us: 'The industry has contributed constructively to the legislation.'

Dudley Ollis, Secretary of Environmental Health and Safety at UK trade association Intellect said: 'We welcome the Directive and hope that it is implemented in the most equitable and cost-effective way.'

Sony responded: 'We are conducting an investigation and analysis but it will be carrying on for several months so we won't be issuing a statement yet.'

HP, however, was more forthcoming, and already has a UK WEEE program manager in place - Alice Castell. She told us: 'HP welcomes the recently agreed Directive. We have been working on such an approach for a number of years and already operate a 'take back' scheme for commercial and domestic customers.

'HP has already invested in design for recycling - including the use of recycled material in new products.

'We are also working with the trade association in the UK, Intellect, to develop an industry solution for implementing the Directive in the UK.'

The targets set by WEEE are also a bone of contention within the industry. Ollis said that while most producers could easily meet the 4kg recycling target, recovering and recycling 75 and 70 per cent of some goods may be impossible.

For example, as plasma televisions and TFT monitors become more popular, producers simply have no use for the parts recovered from older CRT televisions and monitors.

Directing the Directive

The 2006 deadline for WEEE may seem like some way off. But this is to give manufacturers time to get recycling infrastructures in place and for the Directive to pass into national law in respective member states.