Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)

While this article probably would have been more relevant had I got round to posting it when WEEE came in, I still think it's important to point out what's currently happening regarding the new directive and how it effects people.

WEEE, which stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, is a directive brought in by the government to regulate the disposal of household and industrial electrical equipment. Basically it moves the responsibility of recycling and disposing of products from the consumer to the manufactures and resellers. There are various things that both manufactures and resellers have to do to be compliant with the new regulations, one of which that will be interesting to most of you is the "in store take back" schemes.

The WEEE directive requires resellers of electronic equipment to provide a free service to its customers allowing them to recycle their old equipment when they purchase a new equivalent. So now if you go and buy a new washing machine or TV or anything else electronic the people you buy it from are supposed to provide you with the ability to recycle the unit you are replacing free of charge.

As I said at the start of the article this post is a little late, the WEEE directive actually came into force on the 1st of July 2007 and from what I can see very little has been said about it. I imagine this probably has something to do with the fact that it's going to cost companies a fortune to recycle all of the equipment to the required level. If you go to any of the major high street electronic retailers websites they do have information about the scheme, however on pretty much every site I went to, it was very well hidden indeed. The WEEE directive states that the retailers have to provide full information to their customers in store about how to recycle their waste goods, I haven't been to any major electrical retailers lately but I have an idea that the relevant information probably isn't as easy to come by as it should be. Maybe that could be a little experiment for a future post.

If you've had any experience taking advantage of the WEEE directive then let me know. It would be nice to know if it actually works as smoothly as it sounds like it should.

For more information on the scheme and how it works follow this link to the governments NetRegs website.