At UK Whitegoods we get loads of information sent to us every month and often amongst it are some real pearls of wisdom. One such pearl arrived a few days ago from a German company called RAL Quality Assurance Association (www.ral-online.org) outlining the experience in Germany of the WEEE Directive which was implemented there on 24th March.
The release outlines the confusion amongst the 450 German local authorities, public bodies, producers or producer consortia over transportation of goods affected by the directive as well as other obstacles that have arisen in the course of implementation which were not foreseen. It is however predicted that these issues will be resolved in a reasonable time.
Interestingly however it is pointed out that the system employed to dispose of refrigeration waste is far from transparent. It would appear that there is no guarantee that any cabinet paid to be recycled actually will be recycled and that there is no system in place to ensure that it would be and certainly not where it should be.
Difficulty in even disposing of waste refrigeration in the UK currently is a subject reported in last week’s Channel 4’s “Dispatches” program which has led to fly-tipping and illegal disposal of such items. The fear obviously being that the introduction of the WEEE Directive in the UK will only exacerbate these issues still further.
Currently disposal of such waste from a commercial standpoint is difficult, costly or illegal in the UK.
It is also very clear that, in Germany, the consumer is footing the bill for disposal which is where the cost will have to reside ultimately.
Meanwhile in Germany there are fears that waste appliances could be shipped out of Germany illegally to non-European countries who do not have to comply with the WEEE Directive. This is similar to the situation highlighted by the Dispatches report where waste seemed to be being shipped from Southern to Northern Ireland for illegal disposal to landfill.
As far as I am aware there are no systems in place in the UK to counter this problem either and old products have been shipped to Third World countries, especially Africa, for many years from the UK.
In effect there it seems that there are no controls over what is happening to the waste in Germany and little knowledge of where it actually ends up. RAL does report that the targets for recycling refrigeration product have not been mate and that the system is based entirely on trust, RAL don’t think that that is enough.
Given the information that we’ve had so far on the WEEE Directive for the UK as well as the waste industry I can see us sharing much of the German experience.
RAL can be contacted at info@ral-online.org