According to a plastic and waste recycler, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive is not delivering what it was meant to, as export waste levels are on the increase.
The director of Axion Recycling, Keith Freegard, said: “It is clear the WEEE Directive is failing to deliver what it set out to do. The best treatment, recovery and recycling techniques should be applied to maximise material re-use and to minimise human health and the environment.”
Freegard noted that the WEEE Directive was put in place so that electrical waste would be recycled into new products and hazardous materials would be removed from landfills. The reality is, however, that untreated WEEE exports, labelled for re-use, are being sent to developing nations where there are fewer or no controls on the disposal of unwanted hazardous materials.
The company director stressed that this practice was unacceptable, as computers, for example, are being recycled in developing countries “in extremely dangerous ways. He added that WEEE, in some cases, is burned in order to extract valuable metals.
Freegard has said that the government should make it more difficult to export WEEE, which would make it much more likely that the recycling was happening in the UK.
Thanks to www.rwminfo.com for the above quotes, for more information on this article please visit their website.
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