Electrical firms must foot recycling bills, EU rules
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Your support makes all the difference.Companies that make electrical products, from toasters to cellphones, will have to pay for them to be dismantled and recycled at the end of their working life, under a landmark EU law agreed yesterday.
The directive is expected to transform the way businesses design a whole range of electrical equipment.
EU member states will have to oversee a huge increase in the amount of material collected and recycled from December 2006.
By that date, 4kg of household electrical waste per head of population will have to be collected. While that figure – which includes heavy items such as fridges and cookers – will not be a challenge for Britain, other EU countries, such as Greece, will have to improve collection greatly.
Britain will face difficulties in matching the targets for recycling. These stipulate the need for the re-use of 65-80 per cent of one category of equipment, including Televisions and stereos, and 50-80 per cent of another, ranging from toasters to electronic toys.
Last night's agreement was the final stage of haggling over the directive, between the European Commission, member states and the European Parliament.It is now certain to be approved.
With the growth of information technology, the amount of electrical waste has been increasing steadily. By the end of the decade, 8 per cent of all waste is expected to come from this category of goods alone.
At present, 90 per cent of such waste is put into landfills, incinerated or sent for scrap metal without prior treatment. Although firms expect to put up prices to cover recycling costs, some of the bigger firms have welcomed the new directive.
"Individual producer responsibility has been established – that is very positive," said Viktor Sundberg, director of European affairs at Electrolux, the world's largest maker of household goods. "It will be an incentive to produce more environmentally friendly products." The company estimates the cost of recycling an Electrolux refrigerator, worth around €500 (£316), would be about €10 (£6.30).
Chris Davies, a Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament's environment committee, added: "This is a landmark decision which is going to put great pressure on the UK Government to start conforming to the high standards met in Sweden, Denmark or Norway."
Mr Davies accused the Government of "fighting tooth and nail" to water down the legislation and of trying, unsuccessfully, to remove a clause that applies the law to imported goods and those produced by small businesses.
In effect, the legislation means that companies will have to put up a guarantee to cover the costs of dismantling and recycling their goods when they are put on the market.
Orgalime, a group representing 100,000 machinery and electronics companies, said the changes would cost industry more than €7.5bn (£4.7bn).
The European Parliament and governments also agreed a partial ban on heavy metals in electrical and electronic equipment, including lead, mercury, cadmium and chromium, from July 2006.
The laws are part of the EU's promotion of recycling, which includes moves to make car makers financially responsible for the disposal of old models as of 2007.
HOW PRODUCTS CAN BE RECYCLED
MOBILE PHONES
Most toxic are the batteries, which have to be sent to plants on the Continent where metals such as lithium, nickel and cadmium can be safely removed and recycled. What remains are plastics, some small circuit boards, a liquid crystal display and a few metal parts. "The real problem is getting economies of scale – individually, phones are small, but they have useful metals like gold," said Claire Snow, director of the Industry Council For Electronic Equipment Recycling (ICER). "The circuit boards can be ground up and even smelted to yield the metals. Even the plastics can be used. But the real problem is getting enough recycled materials. Producers making new items needs thousands of tons, not the odd half-ton here or there from a recycling plant."
VIDEO RECORDERS
The "brominated flame retardant plastics" (BFRPs) used in the casing and coatings of VCRs pose a problem. While the printed circuit boards inside the machines can be removed for useful constituents, the BFRPs pose a bigger question. "It has to be removed, because there's no known recycling use," Ms Snow said. "The difficulty is that the directive talks about recycling as much as possible, but nobody will want to use these recovered plastics in a new VCR or TV – because their lack of recycled uses, and the fact they have to be taken out by hand, puts up the cost of the item."
PERSONAL COMPUTERS
The body of the PC and its keyboard pose the same problems as VCRs and fridges: the plastics have to be re-used, although the metals can easily be extracted. The real problems are with the glass in monitors. This contains high levels of lead and/or cadmium, which will leach into water supplies if put into landfill. No method exists to remove the metal from the glass, although it can be used for tinted glass doors in office buildings. The trend towards flat liquid-crystal screens presents even more problems. "Nobody knows what's in them; the producers keep it secret," said Ms Snow.
FRIDGES
Metal is eminently recyclable, but finding uses for the plastics and CFC-containing foam (used as an insulator) is difficult once the ozone-destroying CFCs have been removed. "Fridge recycling is so new that the market is just settling down. It costs about £10 to £20 per fridge," said Ms Snow of the ICER. CFC extraction leaves the foam as a crumbled, sandy substance that has no known use – yet. Similarly, the plastics from the trim and the door seals are of uncertain composition. ICER is still searching for uses there too.
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