News 

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.

Nick Fearon, a Press Officer at the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) told us of the tortuous route the Directive must travel to be applicable to the UK. 'A Directive is not regulation and is not transposed directly to national law,' he said. 'The WEEE Directive will spend six to eight weeks going through translative and legal processes, where legal points will be fine tuned. It will then be voted upon at a sitting of the European Council. Finally, it will be ratified at a plenary session.'

That should take us to around March of next year, after which it take a further 18 months to transpose into UK law and a further six months settling period.

However, it is just this implementation at government level where such Directives can fall down. The WEEE Directive is an Article 175. This means that individual governments have a certain degree of choice as to how the Directive is best translated into national law.

Both industry and environmental bodies are concerned that WEEE might receive the same treatment from the DTI as the Packaging Directive, which still allows legal disposal by incineration of packaging in its implementation in the UK.

Mark Strutt, Toxics Campaigner at Greenpeace, told us, 'It is important that the Directive is implemented properly for it to have a significant impact on the waste created by electronic products. It has to be able to do what it is designed to do.'

HP's Castell told us that the government would need to better its poor policing of the Packaging Directive to make WEEE effective.

To

ADVERTISEMENT

this end, Intellect is pushing for a single representative body to manage and oversee the implementation in the UK.

Whose responsibility?

One of the key points of argument is how strictly the idea of producers being individually responsible for their own products and brands in the Directive is translated into law.

With WEEE, Greanpeace's Strutt says, 'It has to be the individual responsibility of the producer for collecting and dealing with [their products]. Collective systems present a danger in that participants are more able to evade their responsibility.'

HP supports this view: 'We are working to ensure that the UK implementation of WEEE involves individual responsibility. This puts the onus on the government rather than the industry to enforce the Directive,' said Castell.

'Collective schemes can only work for historical waste - to recover goods that are already out there - and for small businesses, provided that they are industry led,' she said.

Ollis, of Intellect, agrees. 'Only individual responsibility will give companies the incentive to design for recycling. Because producers have to ring fence funds to be made available for the recycling of their products, collective schemes create the opportunity for free-riders - companies that bring products to market from outside the EU, knowing full well they won't have to pay for recycling them.'

Ollis added: 'The DTI wants to retain the right for collective schemes in certain areas where sorting out responsibility is impractical - particularly applicable to smaller items - and companies can be billed according to market share. We support this although there needs to be measures in place to stop free-riders.'

Fearon said the DTI is aware of the needs of small businesses and is pushing for the inclusion of communal recycling schemes within the Directive.

The DTI will be running a road show to alert small businesses to the obligations they will need to meet under WEEE.

Cost and Competition

There is clearly work to be done in ensuring that the EU does not become a less competitive place to do business because of the Directive. We are all too well aware of the 'Rip-off Britain' tag that we labour under, and making electronic goods more expensive will not help. Fearon told us: 'We have been vocal in our support for business and are working hard to protect British interests.'

Similarly, there has to be methods to apply the Directive to goods entering the EU from outside and to prevent a grey market of imported goods. It is early days for any decisions about just how this will be accomplished. Spokespersons from the EU and DTI have suggested that adding the cost of recycling may be included in 'import papers' or that the public could take out 'recycling insurance' for bringing goods into the EU that were bought outside.

The EU and the DTI are wary about giving any precise figures for how much extra goods will cost once the cost of recycling is added in. We were told implementing the Directive could hike prices for computers and TVs by 2 or 3 per cent and white goods, such as fridges and washing machines, around 1 per cent.

Ollis thinks 3 per cent is rather low and that the charges for beaurocracy and sorting returned product, added to the cost of recycling, could increase this to 10 per cent for some goods. Particularly, says Ollis, as it is often cheaper to manufacture goods from new rather than recycled materials.

However, how much of this extra cost is passed on to the customer is debatable. 'It's still a competitive market, and companies may decide to swallow some of their margins rather than put up prices,' said Ollis.

Even so, the increase in landfill tax and the introduction of an incineration tax in the UK will mean any hike in the price of electronic goods to recycle them would be offset by the cost of disposing of them by other means. What increasing disposal taxes won't control, though, is people dumping their equipment in the countryside and polluting the environment.

Currently, it's the tax-payer that pays for the disposal costs of electronic equipment, both financially and through the health and environmental hazards this presents. The WEEE Directive has the potential for social justice in that the purchaser pays for the disposal of the product.

Ultimately, the recycling and effective disposal of products may even bring prices down. Says Strutt: 'Disposing will cost more and more money. With better design and infrastructure, customers should not be paying any premium and maybe even less. Once the infrastructure is in place, manufacturers will save money hand over fist.'

The Waste

Today, electronic equipment is the fastest growing waste stream in the EU - on average 14 kg per person. 90 per cent of this waste is dumped in landfill sites or incinerated.

The heavy metals to be banned, Cadmium, Mercury, Hexavalent chromium and lead, are all either toxic, carcinogenic or both.

Lead from electronic waste accounts for 40 per cent of all lead found in landfills and 50 per cent of that found in incinerators.

Not only is the fact that they turn up in landfill sites and incinerators a cause for concern, but the products they are used in means they are already widespread throughout our homes and businesses.

Everyone we talked to agreed that the WEEE Directive is a good idea and supported the idea of including the cost of safely disposing of a product in its price.

Ollis summed it up: 'It's a shared chain, from producer to consumer, and everyone has their part to play in protecting the environment.'