Date published: 2007/07/01
The BBC says:
A much-delayed law that makes British producers and importers of electronic goods responsible for the recycling of their products has come into force.
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive requires 4kg of "e-waste" to be recycled per person.
Manufacturers have to fund recycling schemes, while retailers must offer take-back services to customers.
The legislation was supposed to be operational by August 2005 but was delayed by "major difficulties".
"E-waste", which includes PCs, games consoles, microwaves and washing machines, is the fastest-growing form of rubbish in the European Union.
The UK produces an estimated 1.2m tonnes of e-waste each year, most of which has been ending up in landfill sites.
"I think this is an absolutely great piece of legislation," said Jonathan Wright, a senior supply chain executive for Accenture, the management consultancy.
"In the past, all that companies focused on was getting products made and getting them out to customers," he explained.
"Now, organisations are having to think about what is going to happen after the product has been sold."
Gee whiz, producers have been "focused on" products. Who would have thought it. If this is the level of genius commentary that Wright has to offer, hopefully nobody will hire Accenture to take advantage of his talent. Why HP, IBM, etc., should suddenly become recyling experts instead of electronics experts is a question Wright doesn't seem to worry about. And no doubt the reason he thinks this is "an absolutely great piece of legislation" is because unfortunately some companies will be forced to hire the like of Accenture to try and figure out how to comply with this directive. And this directive imposes nothing on consumers, who can still choose how to dispose of their electronic equipment.
The requirement that "4 kg of 'e-waste' [ should ] be recycled per person" is the typical EU approach to waste. It does not matter how much you produce, as long as you "recycle" (i.e. carefully hand over to the State for industrial re-processing) a certain amount of it. As a comparison, according to the figures in the article, the UK is currently producing around 20 kg of e-waste per person per year. So a hugely expensive system is being put in place for not much gain. (Of course, all the Eurocrats have to justify their existence so will introduce more legislation on this front in future.)
And there is yet another negative point of the directive:
[ HP's takeback compliance manager, Kirstie McIntyre, ] voiced concern that the EU directive did not offer the same incentives as WEEE legislation in Japan.
"What they have done in Japan is introduce a more individual producers' responsibility approach," she said.
"Instead of HP being responsible for any old IT and recycling it, we are only responsible for HP equipment."
This had a number of additional environmental benefits, she added.
"Most of the environmental impact in complex manufactured goods is decided at the design stage.
"If we design our products to be more recyclable at the end-of-life stage, we not only reap the economic benefits but also the design decisions that we have made.
"Why should we make [components] easier to remove when we are getting everybody else's laptop back.
"At the end of the day, we have shareholders and we have to make a very strong business case for any changes that we make.
"At the moment, we do have design changes that we can make, but we cannot make the business case stack up because we do not get enough of our own products back."
How stupid can the EU get?
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