Surrey start-up launches collection service for WEEE

Reco-Vie (Recycling) has been set up over the last eight months by three former employees of fridge recycling company Technowaste Ltd – Carl Oliver, Mark Hadley and Nick Catling.

The new company, which will be based in Surrey, will specialise mainly in collecting business-to-business waste electronics, but Mr Hadley told letsrecycle.com that contracts have already been signed to collect WEEE from local authorities.

”As a company we aim to close the gap between Europe and the UK and use the expertise already present on the mainland to push things forward over here.“
– Mark Hadley, Reco-Vie
Once collected, equipment will be sent to reprocessors in the UK and abroad by Reco-Vie, and contracts have been signed with reprocessing facilities. Some items will be sent to continental Europe for reprocessing.

Mr Hadley explained: “We will be using a couple of our own collection vehicles as well as several large haulage companies to collect WEEE and take it for recycling. We also have two bulking up plants, although we will look to open more when the need increases.”

New regulations stemming from Europe's WEEE Directive are likely to make producers of electrical equipment responsible for the collection and recycling of waste items from next year.

Europe
There are 10 categories of waste electronics that are to be covered by the new regulations, which are expected to be laid before Parliament in the summer. As well as larger WEEE items, Rico-Vie is also looking to make arrangements with recyclers of smaller types of WEEE, such as smoke detectors and coffee percolators. Mr Hadley said that many of these items would, at the moment, need to be dealt with abroad.

“In Europe they have been dealing with some of these problems for 10 years,” he said. “In this country we are very new to it, but as a company we aim to close the gap between Europe and the UK and use the expertise already present on the mainland to push things forward over here.”

Away from WEEE, schemes are also to be developed to recycle plastics and tyres as well as “a number of other materials,” the company said. It is developing new solar-powered compacting equipment from the USA and tyre recycling technology that it says has been successfully trialled in Japan.