OPINION: The e-waste industry is a recycling success story but one that has reached its limits. European legislation in 2007 required member states to recycle per capita targets of waste electrical and electronic equipment funded by manufacturers. The drive was to move e-waste out of landfills or energy from waste into recycling, and it has largely been successful. E-waste is low tonnage in the municipal general waste stream, but it is growing. Now is the time to set per capita reuse targets and move e-waste out of recycling and into reuse and to include the general public by providing fully separated collection systems and banning e-waste from all waste and recycling bins.
In a single generation, our homes and workplaces have been transformed by new and useful electronic and electrical equipment. It is a growth market in every aspect of our lives: healthcare, leisure, communications, cooking, shopping, travel and waste but policy development to protect our valuable resources has not kept pace.
How we measure e-waste matters; West London Waste Authority and Restart measured the reusability of e-waste passing through one household waste and recycling centre and found that almost 30% of items could be reused with no or minimal intervention. This evidence demonstrates that valuable products are currently being destroyed unnecessarily to meet recycling targets.
Future costs will be linked to the carbon cost of production whether in residual waste or rejects from recycling. If you measure the composition of household residual waste bins, historically e-waste has formed 0.5 to 1% of the collected tonnage. Measured instead by embedded carbon (the work and the earth’s resources required to manufacture these products), e-waste represents 7–8% of the total embedded carbon in the waste. Within the next few years, this cost will be transferred directly to the operators of energy from waste plants but really it should be going to the producer responsibility schemes.
The growth of e-waste in municipal collection services is becoming more evident due to fires and service failures. I vividly remember the shock of my first fire as an operational manager: my responsibility for the driver, the vehicle, the almost closed A road, the customers left waiting. My experience was a single incident during nine years of managing waste crews. Today, that experience is no longer exceptional. Crews, weighbridge operators, supervisors, managers and leaders are all being trained to manage fires. Some sites have become uninsurable, the predictability of operations uncertain. The cost of e-waste fires in waste and recycling loads is being felt by waste collection and waste disposal authorities, operators and the general public, through a significant deterioration of infrastructure and service but really it should be going to the producer responsibility schemes.
To support a growth industry that is unintentionally pushing costs to our sector, what is needed now is for those costs to be transferred back along with new bold reuse targets, keeping recycling as a support act. Making this change will protect and recirculate resources, increase the life of valuable products, improve national productivity and support digital inclusion. It will require ambitious and proactive change and a dialogue with citizens. It can leverage the public sector, or it can sit fully outside the public sector, but it cannot fail to adapt and improve.
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