Thank you to the eagle-eyed readers that spotted the error in the issue of Eye on WEEE that we circulated this morning. It was, of course, 4 new members that joined us in 2020, not 43! Corrected below. Have a good weekend!
Dear friends,
I hope you are all in good health and have had a productive first half of 2021. At this time of year we have the opportunity to reflect on the results from the previous year as it is the moment when many of our members issue their annual reports. In the WEEE Forum, the following numbers are among the key measures:
- 1 new enhanced vision on Extended Producer Responsibility
- 6 professionals in the team
4 new members in 2020 and 5 in 2021 bringing the current total to 45 - the highest number ever!
- 127 organizations from 51 countries registered to #ewasteday
- 4 EU funded projects
- 9 issues papers and reports
- More than 20 speaking engagements
We will continue to do our best to maintain this rising curve and the updates below provide more details of this.
In the coming months we will also share with you more results of our work: three reports covering batteries, photovoltaic panels and the digitalisation of the e-waste collection and recycling sector. The latter, prepared by European Policy Centre, will be presented in a webinar on 30 September at 14:00 CET. Don't fail to add the date to your calendars!
In the meantime, I wish you an enjoyable and restful summer time.
Pascal Leroy, Director General
WEEE Forum gains new members and expands its twinning initiative
In July 2021 two new members will join the WEEE Forum: Lightcycle from South Africa and MoldControl from the Republic of Moldova. The membership of the latter has been made possible by the WEEE Forum’s newly launched Twinning initiative.
The Twinning initiative involves one of the more established PROs in the WEEE Forum twinning with an emerging PRO in a country where EPR has only recently been put in place, in order to benefit from sharing experience and knowledge. In this case Moldcontrol twinned with their neighbours, Romanian system ECOTIC. Another ‘pair’ also joined the programme recently, creating links between Belgium (Recupel) and India (Karo Sambhav).
Lightcycle and MoldControl bring the total number of Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs) in the WEEE Forum to 45, this is more members than at any point in its 19 year history.
Connecting with these organisations reflects the desire of the WEEE Forum to globally share e-waste experience and management best practice and engage with actors in all parts of the world.
“The consumer is the key to Circular Economy”: join the fourth International E-Waste Day and raise public awareness of e-waste
This year’s International E-Waste Day (#ewasteday), taking place on 14 October, will focus on the crucial part each of us plays, as consumers and citizens, in making circularity a reality for e-products.
According to the UN, in 2021 each person on the planet will produce on average 7.6 kg of e-waste, meaning that a massive 57.4 million tonnes will be generated worldwide. Only 17.4 per cent of this electronic waste, containing a mixture of harmful substances and precious materials, will be recorded as being properly collected, treated and recycled. Many initiatives are undertaken to tackle this growing concern, but none of them can be fully effective without the active role and correct education of consumers.
“Education and awareness are powerful tools for preventing waste and boosting separate collection and quality treatment. If you need to climb a mountain you need the right tools. International E-Waste Day is the right kind of tool” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, European Commissioner for the Environment in his dedicated message last year.
This is one of the reasons why this year too, the WEEE Forum invite all stakeholders to plan awareness raising activities for 14 October and join this common effort by registering as an official participant of International E-Waste Day. Any action promoting sound e-waste collection, repair, reuse or recycling is welcome in the frame of International E-Waste Day. Registered participants will get access to the official promotional materials. Further details below.
CEWASTE project reaches it conclusion
CEWASTE is one of the EU funded projects the WEEE Forum has been involved in and focused on standards in e-waste collection, treatment and recycling through the development of a voluntary certification scheme.
After 2.5 years of research, development and testing, the CEWASTE Final Report has been published. It outlines the outputs of the project, these being the 'Normative requirements for improving CRM recycling from WEEE & waste batteries, and the Assurance and verification tools and manuals for auditors and operators (access through the 'Reports & Papers' section of the CEWASTE online library), as well as making numerous recommendations for increasing the recycling of critical raw materials. Among these is that legislation should dictate that critical raw materials in e-waste and batteries have to be recycled. Some of the other recommendations are:
- Integrate CEWASTE normative requirements into the European standard for e-waste treatment (EN 50625 series) and make the whole set legally binding
- Use market incentives to spur the economic viability of recovering CRMs and to stimulate the use of recovered CRMs in new products
- Create platforms where demand for recycled components, materials and CRMs can meet supply
- Consolidate fractions of CRM-rich products into quantities more attractive for recyclers
- Improve access to information on CRM-rich components and monitor actual recycling
- Enforce rules around shipment of CRM-rich fractions outside the EU and respect of technical standards along the value chain
Read the full article here and find additional info in the projects' section below. The results and conclusions of the project were also widely reported by the global media. You can read articles in The Guardian, New Scientist and listen an interview with our Director General, Pascal Leroy on BBC Digital Planet.
I4R Platform celebrates its third anniversary!
The Information for Recyclers platform, known as the I4R platform, aims to provide a whole range of information and guidance on how to handle e-waste.
DIGITALEUROPE and APPLiA, jointly with the WEEE Forum, constructed this common online platform to comply with Article 15 of the Directive 2012/19/EU (WEEE Directive), which requests that producers provide information free of charge regarding preparation for re-use and treatment in respect of each type of new e-products placed for the first time on the EU market.
Since early 2018, the I4R community has been continuously growing and counts now nearly 700 users from the WEEE recycling, manufacturing, and preparing for re-use sectors, as well as from governments and related organisations. In total 43 product technical datasheets (fiches) available.
The platform has been recently improved with two new sections:
* Useful links section: list of useful links to documents and/or websites that can provide more information or specific details about the presence and location of materials and components in e-waste that require separate treatment.
* Fiches at a glance: printable summary table matching the presence of components and substances of concern to electrical and electronic products.
Our members look back at 2020
Some of our members have issued their Annual Reports for the last year. See how the pandemic has affected the work of PROs in their respective countries by clicking on the links below to access the respective reports.
Project news
The WEEE Forum has at its core the desire to assist with driving the transformation to the circular economy in the electrical and electronic equipment sector, contribute to practical research and demonstrations that lead to improvement in the value chain and to be part of relevant cutting-edge data collection and analysis. This is why we get involved in EU funded projects and the three Horizon 2020 projects that we are currently working on all reflect this desire. Further news on these projects is provided below.
CircThread: Digital thread for CE product, resource and service management
The CircThread project kicked off two weeks ago. Our members ZEOS (Slovenia) and Erion (Italy) are also involved. It is a four year project which aims to:
• Unlock access to product data between stakeholders for enhanced CE decision making across the extended product life cycle
• Deliver an ‘information broker’ software platform – individual products gain a digital identity with links to information in a publicly accessible ‘catalogue’
The Information will be covering product status logs and materials, resources, critical raw materials, substances, product lifespan, environmental, social, end-of-use options. the project also plans to run test for home appliances, incl. dishwashers, washing machines, refrigerators as well as for home energy systems, incl. boilers, batteries, solar-panels.
More info will follow soon. In the meantime, why not keep up to date by following them on Twitter and LinkedIn.
C-SERVEES: Measuring the sustainability of circular economy business models in C-SERVEES
C-SERVEES is developing, implementing and testing new circular economy business models in order to assess their suitability and sustainability when applied to washing machines, laser printers and their toner cartridges, telecom equipment and televisions.
Under the scope of the demonstrations the practicality of using 3D printers for producing spare parts is currently being explored. Involving partner, Particula Group of Croatia, the idea is that the parts can be printed anywhere in the world where there is a 3D printer, meaning, not only are parts readily available close to where they are needed, the environmental and economic cost of transport is also removed making the parts more accessible to the user.
Work continues on this aspect of the project.
CEWASTE: project's final results
On 24 March the CEWASTE project held a hugely successful final event at which over 200 stakeholders learned about the work and results of the project and discussed the future of critical raw material (CRM) recycling. If you missed the event, watch the full recording and view the slides by clicking on the links on the right.
The Final Public Report has also been published and contains all of the projects findings and recommendations in an easily approachable format. Most important of them, to integrate CEWASTE normative requirements into the European standard for e-waste treatment (EN 50625 series) and make the whole set legally binding.
The WEEE Forum is grateful for the opportunity to contribute in the project and truly hopes its findings will help improve the recycling of critical raw materials in the future.
COLLECTORS project promoted as a success story by European Commission
COLLECTORS concluded at the end of 2020 after three years of research during which the project partners collected, analysed and disseminated local good practices on municipal waste collection that lead to high quality recycling and used these to provide guidelines for decision-makers in waste collection and treatment.
Such was the quality of the project that it has been elected as a success story by the European Commission, which means it is promoted by them as an example of a research that will make a difference.
The WEEE Forum is proud to have participated in COLLECTORS alongside our members Appliances Recycling, ecosystem, Ecotic, Electrão, ElektroEko and Erion.
Members' news
WEEE Ireland: Six million batteries recycled through five supermarkets in 2020
Almost six million batteries were recycled in through five supermarkets in Ireland last year as more people used their grocery shop to do their bit for the planet. WEEE Ireland collected half of this huge haul from Aldi stores, which led the charge on 3.2 million, double that of its German rival Lidl on 1.6 million. WEEE Ireland also picked up 850,000 used batteries from Tesco and 224,000 from SuperValu, while Dunnes Stores prevented over 97,000 ending up in landfill. In total, the equivalent of 21 million AA batteries were recycled by householders in 2020 through retailers and civic amenity sites – an average of four for everyone in Ireland!
Despite the encouraging data, for every 10 AA batteries sold on the market, only four are returned for recycling, with 20% in a recent survey admitting to dumping used batteries in general waste bins.
RoRec (Romania): No batteries in the trash bin! The Recycling Patrol's national competition 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic might have stopped many things, but not the young volunteers’ drive to encourage the collection of used batteries all over Romania. The kids and teachers enrolled in the Recycling Patrol are competing in the 2021 edition of the national contest `No batteries in the trash bin!”.
While Romania may still be lagging behind the European batteries recycling standards, the volunteers of the Recycling Patrol continue to foster progress in this respect, with incredible records. Find out why this year’s edition is special, as the Recycling Patrol celebrates its 10 years anniversary.
Recupel (Belgium): 'out of fridge' campaign reminding consumers to recycle their refrigerators
Belgians are exceptionally good at recycling everything that's in their fridge: bottles, cans, jars, yoghurt pots and so on. Only the recycling of the refrigerator itself needs to be improved and Recupel aims to tackle this problem.
So, how can you best reach people with a message about their refrigerator? By getting that message ‘IN’ their fridge. That is why Recupel is launching its own brand of sauces. A medium that’s in the fridge for months and that is used all the time. On these sauce pots, messages are reminding people time after time to properly recycle their refrigerator. See how it works in the video below.
Environ (Romania) launches childrens' book "Baterel and Amy Teach You" - a guide to recycling
Earlier in June, on International Environment Day, Environ Association launched the book "Baterel and Amy teach you", a guide to segregated waste collection and recycling aimed primarily at children, but which also contains useful information for parents and teachers.
The book is in 12 chapters that address topics such as the history of recycling, the classification of recyclable and non-recyclable waste and provides details on how to collect it separately in correct way, how often waste can be recycled and what new products it can be turned into after recycling, practical exercises, as well as a series of recommendations for those interested in deepening their knowledge for a more environmentally friendly lifestyle.
ECOTIC (Romania): 15 years for a clean environment!
ECOTIC is celebrating its 15th anniversary in 2021 and about to achieve 200 000 tonnes of e-waste collected. ECOTIC was established in April 2006 and represents more than 600 producers. In 2020 they ran 125 awareness-raising and collection campaigns reaching out to nearly 13 million consumers in Romania. Under the link below you can read about all the projects and initiatives they have undertaken during 15 years of operations.
UFH (Austria): WEEE recycling - how protecting our climate can work
For almost 30 years, UFH has been a leading company in the area of climate protection. As well as collecting and treating e-waste UFH also does the same for batteries and photovoltaic equipment.
UFH has dedicated itself to promoting the message that a circular economy leads to a better use of resources and ensures that partners and systems in the e-waste value chain function in a smooth, circular manner.
In the video above, UFH Managing Director, Robert Töscher, points out the need for a closed loop cycle based on the proper disposal of waste electrical equipment.
Stay tuned!
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