EU on collision course over e-waste collection

"Collecting and recycling e-waste is good for the environment and good for the economy. Parliament's ambitious but achievable targets will help recover valuable raw materials and cut the flow of e-waste to landfills, incinerators and developing countries," said rapporteur MEP Karl-Heinz Florenz (European People's Party, Germany).

Florenz explained that changing the current collection target of four kilograms per head into 85% of e-waste in the market by 2016 "forces member states to a systematic mapping of e-waste", puts an end to national exemptions" and allows comparing results between the EU-27.

The Greens welcomed the moves to increase the scope and collection targets and to tighten important loopholes with regard to shipments to non-OECD countries.

Greek Green MEP Michail Tremopoulos said that obliging retailers to take back very small waste appliances, such as light bulbs or mobile phones, regardless of whether a new appliance is sold at the same time would be a good thing. It would increase the collection of these appliances and raise consumer awareness about the topic which would “reduce the amount of these small appliances ending up in the general waste stream and thereby escaping adequate treatment,” he said.

Bulgarian MEP Vladko Todorov Panayotov, Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (ALDE) Group’s shadow rapporteur, said that “with this report we are taking further steps towards establishing a common EU market for waste treatment.  Europe would be not only more resource efficient, by recycling greater volumes of electrical and electronic waste and therefore less reliant on external supply, but it will also spare the environment".

But the European Engineering Industries Association (Orgalime) said that policymakers should be reminded that, originally, the point of the recast was “to tweak aspects of the original Directive not thought to be working well”. Whereas now “the dossier seems to have ‘run away with itself’,“ and turned into a major revision.

Orgalime’s director general Adrian Harris said that “having consistently argued the need for this recast in the first place, we now find ourselves attempting to limit the potential damage to an already fragile manufacturing economy that could stem from proposals, such as i) an open scope without impact assessment, ii) weakened enforceability through an exclusively European approach for ‘the producer’ in waste management legislation or iii) the obligation to establish design requirements on the recyclability of products by 2014 without taking into account existing study findings and procedures of the Eco Design Directive.”

European Association of Craft, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (UEAPME) is also “disappointed” by the Parliament’s stance, which seeks to oblige retailers to collect small waste electric and electronic goods left by consumers at no cost and without any requirement on consumers to buy a new product of the same kind.

UEAPME sustainable development director Guido Lena said that “the ‘one-to-one’ system backed by the Council is a much more sensible option to which we wholeheartedly subscribe. Tying the collection of e-waste with the purchase of a similar product on the spot would at least partially balance the additional obligations for SMEs. While nobody questions the need to better handle electronic waste, the burden must be properly shared and cannot be placed squarely on private enterprises.”