Designing products around repairability and recovery of materials should be a priority, says Paul Suff.
The global mountain of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is growing by about 50 million tonnes a year as consumers scrap old smartphones, laptops, televisions and solar panels for newer ones. These devices contain many valuable resources, including gold and silver. New research by the University of Sheffield estimates that, by 2020, the value of recyclable WEEE in Europe could reach €3.6 billion.
Realising all that value depends on collecting unwanted devices and equipment. Recycling rates for WEEE are steadily improving. In the UK,
35.4% of household and non-household WEEE (as a proportion of new electrical and electronic equipment placed on the market) was collected in 2012 compared with 34.4% in 2011. However, an estimated 37%, about 590,000 tonnes, of all used electrical and electronic equipment in the UK still goes to landfill.
The European commission says that just one-third of WEEE in the EU is currently being reported by compliance schemes as collected separately and managed appropriately. Some of the remainder is improperly treated or illegally exported abroad or disposed of as part of residual waste in landfills or incinerators. The recast WEEE Directive (2012/19/EU) sets new, higher targets from 2016 to 2019. It requires most member states - newer members have longer to comply - to recover 45 tonnes of e-waste for every 100 tonnes of electronic goods sold by 2016, rising to 65% of sales by 2019 or 85% of all e-waste generated.
But WEEE collection is only part of the solution. If the resources contained in unwanted electrical and electronic equipment are to enter the secondary material market the original products need to be disassembled efficiently and safely. Europe and the UK lack enough capacity to properly deal with the amount of WEEE being generated, while the technologies and business models used by recyclers and treatment centres mean it is sometimes not cost-effective to extract the materials.
Manufacturers' growing use of high-tech plastics and compounds or rare earths, often in very small amounts, have made recovery of materials with a high degree of purity uneconomic. Designing electrical and electronic equipment with ease of disassembly and recovery in mind should therefore be a priority for all producers. Also, designing them to last longer and to be easily repairable, as urged recently by the Green Alliance, would encourage reuse and prevent them being discarded, and possibly being illegally exported to countries where they might damage human health and the environment. Product design should be at the heart of the European commission's circular economy package, due at the end of the year.
