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End-of-Life Recovery & Recycling Technologies in Electrical and Electronic Goods Sector
A Research Project led by the The centre for Sustainable Manufacture and Reuse/Recycling Technology (SMART) at Loughborough University

For further information please contact: Dr. S. Rahimifard Mr M. Abu Bakar The centre for SMART Wolfson School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering Loughborough University Loughborough LE11 3TU United Kingdom Tel: (44) 01509 227657 S.Rahimifard@lboro.ac.uk www.lboro.ac.uk/smart

www.lboro.ac.uk/smart

Project Background
In recent years, growing quantities of end-of-life Electrical and Electronics Equipment have increased the attention devoted to product recovery. EU has responded to this issue by introducing a producer responsibility legislation referred to as the Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive. The directive applies to almost all consumer electrical and electronic equipment and a wide range of business equipment. The main requirements of this directive include the following: Manufacturers, from June 2006, have to finance the end-of-life operations (collection, treatment, recovery, environmentally sound disposal) of WEEE from designated collection sites. The recovery of upto 80% of appliance weight by June 2006. Targets to be revised in December 2008. Collection target of 4kg of WEEE per person per year.

What are the project objectives?


Despite the significant advances in product recovery and recycling technologies in recent years, in most applications the value of recovered parts, components, and materials is not sufficient to justify the cost of Recovery & Recycling (R & R) operations. This is often due to the high costs associated to the collection, disassembly, assessment and pre treatment of used products. Hence, the majority of current R & R practices are solely driven by economical drivers and are not often carried out in an environment friendly way. This research aims to investigate the various end-of-life options for electrical and electronic equipment which are targeted by WEEE Directive and to develop a decision support system to identify the most appropriate end-of-life option for particular electrical and electronic equipment. It is argued that this will facilitate the wide adoption of recovery and recycling technologies in these industrial sectors and thus, resulting in more effective end-of-life management of electrical and electronic equipment. The major assertion made in this project is that there is a need for a long term strategic view for converting the cost burdens associated to the WEEE directive into profit making opportunities (see figure 1 below).

Scale of the Problem


The huge expansion of the range of products that are on offer and are used daily by consumers in an ever expanding global market has resulted in generation of significant amount of used products in electrical and electronic sectors. Furthermore, a large proportion of these are prematurely discarded due to low cost of replacement. In 2002, 7.3 million tonnes of waste from electrical and electronic equipment was generated in Europe and it has been estimated that by 2015 the figure could be as high as 12 million tonnes. The WEEE directive has the significant implications for all parties involved in the production, procurement, use and disposal of electrical and electronic equipment, as highlighted by the cost of implementation of targets set in WEEE in the UK. Estimated UK producers annual costs of compliance with WEEE directive is 217 - 455 million, depending on collection route. (Source: DTI Partial Regulatory Impact Assessment of the WEEE Directive 2003) The initial impact of the legislation will be felt the hardest, as todays electrical and electronic equipments were not designed with either disassembly or recovery in mind. This project will enable manufacturers to consider the whole life cycle of their design decisions for the first time, thus enabling cost effective trade offs to be made that benefit long term profit on their WEEE recovery operations.

The WEEE directive has been developed to help reduce the amount of waste from electrical and electronic equipment which have been consigned to landfill and to encourage resource efficiency by reuse, recycling and recovery. At present, more than 90% of WEEE is landfilled, incinerated or recovered without any pre-treatment which may contribute to further environmental pollution. One of the major issues that has hindered the recycling of WEEE is the economical concerns. However, it is commonly reported that there is a potential hidden value within significant proportion of WEEE. As a result manufacturers need to have a clear awareness of the current costs and possible avenues of revenue generation in recycling WEEE.

Fig1: Time to profit impact of WEEE Directive

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