Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment

In future consumers will have to pay for the disposal of old electrical equipment including computers and monitors. Manufacturers may cover some or all of the eventual disposal cost of new but not existing equipment. Legislation has been delayed on several occasions. The DTI published a letter on 15 October 2002 in which they say:

"For the present we are assuming that the Directives will not be published until the New Year. Our 'best estimate' is March 2003. This would suggest a transposition deadline of September 2004 with the financial aspects of producer responsibility coming in around September 2005."

There are many EU documents on WEEE. The following is an extract from a Commission press release issued on 11 October 2002.

"Member States will have to set up collection systems for waste electrical and electronic equipment, take measures so that WEEE is collected separately and achieve a binding target of 4 kg per capita/per year for the separate collection of WEEE from private households. All costs from the collection points to the environmentally sound treatment, re-use and recycling will be covered by producers for their own products. They will have to provide a financial guarantee at the moment a new product is put on the market. This financial guarantee shall ensure that the management of the waste will be paid by the producer once the equipment reaches its end of life. The producer will, however, also have the choice of either managing the waste on an individual basis or participating in collective schemes. This is an important departure from existing schemes where producers pay a flat rate contribution for the recycling of waste from so-called historical products (i.e. products put on the market years ago). Such schemes are still necessary to collect funds for the recycling of old products for which no provisions have been made at the time when they were put on the market and, for these products, this system will continue to apply for a certain time. However, once the new rules will be fully implemented, producers who design their products for re-use and recycling will be rewarded by lower costs for the treatment of their waste.

The Parliament and the Council also agreed to a ban on four heavy metals (lead, cadmium, mercury and hexavalent chromium) and the brominated flame retardants PBB and PBDE from 1July 2006. Existing national measures on these substances can continue to apply until that date, by which they have to be replaced by the new Community rules. A list of exemptions for certain applications for which currently there is no technical replacement shall be reviewed periodically with a view to progressively reducing these exemptions."

Some local councils may assist with various schemes eg:

"South Beds District Council held a Computer Equipment Amnesty on 30 November 2002."

Typical views are:

• "The cost will not rise for us because we have recycle companies who purchase said items from us. Consequently there is no cost to us."
  
  
• "In a situation where the proportioning of costs has yet to be decided it seems only prudent that equipment that will be subject to the directive should be disposed of before there is a possibility of us finding ourselves faced with having to pay for the privilege of throwing those items away."

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