New research has found that UK householders throw away twice the number of electrical items than was previously thought ““ amounting to one million tonnes of material, or 16kg per person.
But, more than half the 93 million electrical items thrown away will not be recycled under the European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive according to a report from ICER.
This is because the items are less than 2kg in size, and householders are likely to throw them away among general household refuse rather than separately in designated WEEE collection facilities. Under the WEEE Directive, recovery and re-use obligations for producers only apply to separately collected WEEE.
But, ICER warned that the UK government is likely to calculate collection and recovery obligations based on market share rather than the arising of items among separately collected equipment.
Claire Snow, director of ICER, said: “It is going to be very interesting to see how the costs of meeting the WEEE Directive are shared across the UK’s estimated 50,000 producers, particularly as a company’s obligation is likely to be calculated on its market share of sales, rather than the amounts of waste equipment collected.”
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