The regulation of e-waste in most of the 27 EU member states stems mainly from one directive.
In 1992 the EU, then comprising only 15 countries, started to examine a number of priority wastestreams, identified on the basis of their hazard potential and impact on the environment. These wastes included the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Directive (WEEE), end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) and tires. However, it was only in 2002 that Europe-wide legislation affecting WEEE was enacted. Some member states (MSs) had in the meantime adopted their own national systems to deal with WEEE.
Legal Framework for WEEE
The main reason for this slow process of moving from an identified priority waste to legislation to tackle the issue is explained by the complex procedures to formalise legislation in the EU. Legislation usually starts with a proposal put forward by the European Commission (Comm), basically the administrators who service the Council of Ministers representing the governments of each of the 27 MSs and also the European Parliament (EP), whose members are elected directly by the electorate in each MS. Even before putting forward a proposal, the Comm must undertake extensive social and economic analysis of the proposal and consult widely all those parties potentially affected by the proposal.
Since 1995, all legislation passed by the EU needs the agreement of both the Council of Ministers and the EP. This usually requires lengthy negotiation; therefore, it often takes several years before a proposal from the Comm becomes an agreed legislative provision. One of the consequences of a lack of agreement at the end of the legislative procedure is the triggering of the conciliation process under which compromises are hammered out between the Council of Ministers and the EP. Often, this leaves issues to be resolved through a decision by a Technical Adaptation Committee (TAC). Too often these matters are not resolved quickly because the TAC meetings are infrequent.
In the EU there are several different types of regulatory provision. The strictest legislation is a regulation, whose provisions have direct effect in each MS after a certain period of notice, usually 18 or 24 months. Most MSs usually institute their own legislation, however, in order to fit the regulation into their own legislative code. Therefore the EU’s Regulation on Waste Shipments (EC/1013/2006), which implements the international Basle Convention on the movement of hazardous waste, has been enacted in the UK through the Transfrontier Shipment of Waste Regulations 2007 (SI 2007 No.1711).
The next level down is the directive, whereby the broad legislative framework and key environmental targets and dates are set but each MS has the option of instituting the directive into its legislative system in its own way. Again there is a period of time after the legislation has been translated into all the official languages and published in the official journal for the MSs to develop their own legislation. In most cases the MSs will follow the provisions of the directive quite closely but may take them further, although these days there is a general reluctance in MSs to “gold plate” or further develop their own legislation beyond the aims and objectives of a directive.
Each MS has to provide six months notice to the European Commission of any proposed legislation and any subsequent amendments. This allows time for the Comm and all the other MSs to have an opportunity to check that the legislation is appropriate and that other MSs are not adversely affected by the proposals.
Any infringement—failure to implement the legislation on time, for example, or the omission of key provisions or a subsequent failure to hit target levels of WEEE collection or recycling—could lead to the threat of legal action against the MS. The commission brings the case forward to the European Court of Justice (ECJ).
However, because of the length of time the Comm is communicating with the MS to establish evidence and the time delays that are common in bringing cases to court, very few of the infraction proceedings started by the commission result in prosecution proceedings at the ECJ, because the errors and omissions identified will have been remedied in the meantime by the MS.
Several of the EU’s neighboring countries, including Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland, while not members of the EU, have also established WEEE-recovery systems. Often these countries have environmental obligations resulting from their bilateral trade links with the EU. Indeed extended producer responsibility (EPR) for WEEE first started on a voluntary basis in Switzerland in 1991.
Within the EU, WEEE legislation was finally introduced in 2002. In addition, running parallel to the draft of the WEEE Directive in its later stages, there was the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (2002). While all producer responsibility legislation aims to limit the use of hazardous materials, it is only with WEEE that there was this separate legislation.
The EU recognizes 10 categories of WEEE:
- Large household appliances
- Small household appliances
- IT and telecommunications equipment
- Consumer equipment
- Lighting equipment
- Electrical and electronic tools
- Toys, leisure, and sports equipment
- Medical devices
- Monitoring and control instruments
- Automatic dispensers
The main requirements of the WEEE Directive are:
- Collection of at least 4 kilograms per capita per annum of WEEE—target has to be achieved by the MS.
- There is no obligation on householders to return WEEE for collection, but MSs have to take measures to encourage householders to separate WEEE for collection.
- All separately collected waste has to be treated, such as removal of fluids and hazardous materials.
- All treatment facilities have to have environmental permits.
- There are recycling and recovery targets for all WEEE categories except for 8 and 9.
The systems for the recovery of WEEE in practice vary from one state to another, one of consequences of the very broad basis of the European legislation. Most countries have set up producer compliance schemes (PCSs), usually more than one in order to meet the competition requirements of the EU. PCSs take on the responsibility for discharging the obligations of producers, such as collection of WEEE, recovery and recycling targets, and reporting obligations. Producers and importers still must report their sales data, split into various categories, to their PCS. Most countries have two, three, or four, which usually cover different EEE sectors, such as white goods, IT, and gas-discharge lamps.
The UK’s WEEE System
In the UK there are 40 PCSs, some EEE-based but some operated by waste management companies and the operators of packaging compliance schemes. Most of these packaging compliance schemes had been in existence for a decade and were therefore in a good position to tackle the new wastestream in early 2007 when the UK finally implemented the EU WEEE Directive.
The UK system is complex. Each of the WEEE PCSs has to recruit producers. Some PCSs are specialists, while others accept members who have a wide range of different categories of EEE. Those producers and importers provide their data quarterly to their PCS split into 13 categories, the 10 already noted adjusted for separate reporting of refrigeration equipment, display equipment, and gas-discharge lamps.
The WEEE Directive makes provision for the consumer to return WEEE to retailers, but in the UK the majority of retailers preferred to support a national distributor take-back scheme (DTS). This provides finance to local waste-disposal authorities (WDAs) in order to improve the household waste sites to accept WEEE from households. The majority of PCSs will also have negotiated with those same WDAs for access to their WEEE being deposited by householders either directly or linking up with companies running the sites known as DCFs (designated collection facilities). In late 2008 there were over 1,600 DCFs, of which 1,160 are publicly accessible sites and the remainder a mix of facilities, mainly controlled by EEE retail chains.
The WEEE from DCFs then has to be passed onto AAFTs (approved authorised treatment facilities) or AEs (approved exporters) in order that they can process it to separate re-usable equipment, take out re-usable components, separate recyclable materials and segregate hazardous components for treatment. Recyclable materials are then passed on to reprocessors for recycling. The AATFs have to ensure that the recovery and recycling targets are met and that information transmitted back to their contracted PCSs.
The main complication in having so many interactions is balancing the obligation of the PCS with the amounts collected by a PCS, because each PCS has to provide evidence to the regulator that its recovery and recycling obligations for each type of WEEE have been matched by the amounts of materials reclaimed through WEEE collections and processing. The Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) therefore had to set up a settlement center to enable this “evidence” to be exchanged. Nevertheless, there was reluctance on the part of some PCSs to agree to the price, while other PCSs were prepared to offer evidence.
After the first year of the UK’s operations in 2007 was completed, there was a protected negotiation between the main PCS with obligations, REPIC, and the one having greatest access to the WEEE, Electrolink, as to the financial terms for exchange of that evidence. Despite huge efforts by BERR to avoid the problem after the second compliance year, the two companies went to court to try to resolve the issue. A judicial review was held at the High Court in early June 2009.
WEEE Regulation Before 2002
The development of the WEEE systems in several European States was instituted before the WEEE Directive came into force; therefore, those countries have had to make changes to the way in which they deal with WEEE. Probably the most extreme example is Denmark, where they had decided that producer responsibility meant something completely different to the extended producer responsibility at the heart of the WEEE, ELV, Batteries and the revised Packaging and Packaging Waste (2004) Directives.
The Danes argued that as consumers demanding particular products were the real producers and hence the costs associated with the collection, processing, recovery, and treatment of WEEE should be borne by consumers. The Danes opted for municipalities to pay for the necessary transport, treatment, recovery, and disposal for WEEE because consumers as householders pay for waste management services provided by their municipalities. In particular, this meant that hazardous items of WEEE, such as refrigerators, televisions, and gas-discharge lamps, collected either through mobile collection vans or more usually at recycling centers and were then treated using the waste taxes paid by households.
Following the passing of the WEEE Directive in 2002 therefore the Danes had a WEEE collection-and-recovery system already in place and all they had to do was to then persuade the producers to take over the funding of the municipal-based systems. Although this sounds simple—and in comparison to the establishment of systems in other MSs it was—there was still lengthy negotiation with representatives of the producers to ensure they took on their responsibilities.
In the Netherlands, where national legislation was also introduced before the EU legislation was enacted, the main difficulty is hitting the 4-kg-per-capita-per-annum target. Officially, the country is only just hitting the EU’s 4-kg-per-capita-per-annum figure because municipalities were creaming off the metallic fraction and selling the WEEE through scrap merchants while the PCSs are saying that all WEEE should be going through them.
The Netherlands were also concerned that WEEE is being exported as reusable equipment but it has proved difficult to cut down on these activities partly because the equipment is being purchased from organizations, through Internet sales and from retailers and then traded at value, but no one is checking whether the equipment is functioning or not. With the context of the 2008 Greenpeace publicity about WEEE in Ghana, the University of Delft announced that it would accept back the computers it sent two years earlier to Nigeria for further use in educational establishments to undergo treatment and recovery in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, research has shown that 20%–30% of items delivered to municipalities are still capable of further use, comparable to experience in the UK and several other northern European countries.
Finland has got around the problem of a lack of incentive for municipalities to pass on WEEE for proper treatment and recovery by producers providing 85 Euros for every ton of WEEE taken offsite for treatment. Finland has 200 municipal collection points for WEEE and 100 private ones.
With treatment of refrigerators, especially the approach to propane refrigerators, there is a contrast in policy between Finland and Sweden. Sweden allows propane fridges to be processed through normal shredders, while Finland puts both through its main fridge-treatment plant at the same time. Finland is doing this because the refrigerator-treatment plant is next to the high-temperature hazardous incineration plant and therefore the treatment plant is linked by pipeline to enable destruction of the CFCs and other gases within seconds.
Sweden also introduced its initial national legislation before the EU Directive was agreed. This required getting agreement between the electrical equipment producers and importers to fund the system and also a total of 300 municipalities to agree to site containers for WEEE on their household waste-disposal sites. These sites are used by households for the disposal of bulky wastes, such as old furniture and garden waste, but increasingly they now function as waste reclamation facilities for the initial collection of recyclable wastes, such as WEEE.
In 2001 there was a huge problem when the legislation was introduced, because it was introduced for the return of WEE through the national scheme. Unfortunately, the introduction of the new system coincided with a public holiday, and because of huge promotion of the new system there was a great public response that totally overwhelmed the public facilities. Therefore, the national scheme had to lease more ISO containers to store and transport the WEEE and to encourage the processors of WEEE that they had contracted to process and recycle the WEEE faster than was originally anticipated. (In contrast, the introduction of the UK’s system on July 1, 2007, went off without any media attention because it coincided with the banning of smoking in public places in England.)
Theft of WEEE from municipal sites in Sweden and several other MSs used to be a huge problem. The stolen material would be taken to Russia and several of the former Eastern Bloc countries. This is now less of a problem because there has been an increase in incomes in Russia and the Eastern European countries and only partly reversed in the past year.
The ISWA Working Group on Recycling and Waste Minimisation in its autumn 2008 study tour visited Halmstad, a municipality located between Malmo to the south and Gothenburg to the north on the west coast of southern Sweden.
At its worst WEEE arriving in Halmstad’s household waste recycling centers not only had electric leads cut in order to deter theft of WEEE items. When even that failed, each item was spray-painted to render it unsuitable for sale as a reusable item. Halmstad has equipped its latest recycling centers with a high-tension electric fence alarm in order to deter intruders. This seems to be working.
The Future
The EU is now consulting on amendments to the directive, especially in order to ensure that more WEEE is collected and recycled. There is a proposal that the future collection target is linked to an average of the sales of EEE in each MS in the previous three years and currently a 65% target is being proposed.
There are many potentially reusable items delivered to household waste sites. The average for Sweden and the UK is 20%–30% and results from other countries have been similar. In Sweden, all items delivered to these sites have to be processed for materials recovery.
However, in the revision of the WEEE Directive there is now going to be greater emphasis on ensuring that those potentially reusable items can continue to be used on the grounds of resource efficiency.
However, there are some items that should be recycled and not continue to be used—for example, older and less-efficient refrigerators—and there are specific schemes in the UK to do this in order to reduce household carbon emissions.
Also, the possibility of reuse within the MSs home markets might be limited because people are often upgrading their equipment, replacing large CRT televisions by flat screens, for instance, and few people would be willing to accept the old equipment even for free. There will however continue to be a market is the developing economies for such items.
Exports of potentially reusable EEE poses a problem: how to distinguish between genuine reusable items and WEEE, especially where items contain hazardous components? The temptation is greatest where there is a high cost associated with the treatment of the WEEE, televisions, for example. There needs to be tight control over the movement of WEEE and reusable EEE both in the exporting and the importing countries in order to ensure that the exports are genuinely capable of further extended reuse in developing economies.
There are good examples of reuse, however, such as the export of mobile phones. The vast majority of “old” mobile phones disposed of by people in the developed countries have several years’ potential life in them. These cheap mobile phones, when exported, allow the development of communication systems in developing economies without the need for landline systems. People can keep in touch with families when they move away for work, for example, or producers can find out which towns are offering the best prices for their produce.
Another good example of reuse is the export of computers and printers from the UK to Colombia, where they are used in schools. However, in this instance there is provision for the computers to be returned to a state-run treatment workshop for either further reuse, processing for components, reclamation of materials and safe disposal of hazardous components. The workshop also provides for skills training so that people can be trained to repair computers and peripheral equipment.
Ultimately it is the consumer who pays the price for whatever systems are set up in order to treat and reclaim WEEE. In some MSs, such as Eire and the Netherlands, a specific amount of money has been added to EEE in order to fund the system.
Elsewhere the producers fund the system, but, obviously, if their costs are increased then the producer will adjust the price of the product and that will be fed down the supply chain.