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3 July 2007updated 05 Oct 2023 8:26am

Sian’s stash of WEEE

Celebrating the opportunity to get rid of lots of WEEE - that's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equi

By Sian Berry

The big news for me this week wasn’t the spanking, all-new cabinet being put together by Gordon Brown. The only thing I’ll say about that is that David Miliband’s shift from Environment (where the one thing he did well was talk about climate change a lot) appears to confirm that the policy of saving climate change for fine words at summits rather than effective policies at home will continue. Miliband seems to have found his perfect niche at the Foreign Office, where he’ll be able to preach to other countries without worrying about the lack of progress at home.

Sorry, before that diversion what I meant to say was that this week I’m celebrating the fact that I finally have somewhere to take my stash of WEEE.

The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive from the EU was supposed to have become UK law in 2005, but has been delayed more times than I can remember. Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert hosted a meeting for Green MEPs from across Europe two years ago in November. On the first day, as the delegates were travelling by coach across London, a bin lorry blocked their progress and the Europeans were horrified to see refuse staff picking up a pile of computers and monitors from the pavement and simply chucking them into the back of the lorry.

In almost every other country in Europe it was now illegal for binmen to do this, but not in the good old UK, where failing to implement EU environmental directives is becoming a national sport. However, now we can finally get back into their good books. As of July 1st the Directive has become law, and we are now committed to recycling at least 4 kilograms person per year of old electrical tat.

Under the new rules, producers and retailers are responsible for making sure their goods do not end up in landfill or incineration, where the toxic chemicals, exotic metals and associated solders, glues and plastics can cause a whole list of health problems. To comply with the law, companies will either be collecting up WEEE from customers when they sell them a replacement or funding local authority WEEE recycling schemes.

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Everything from computers and toasters to electric train sets is covered by the directive and, although ordinary people are not required to recycle all this stuff, there will be an awful lot of facilities to make sure we can.

The reason I am personally so pleased is that I have been holding onto a lot of WEEE for ages, and at last I can take all this stuff out of my tiny flat and put it back into the ‘resource cycle’. I genuinely can’t wait to get rid of my exploded iron, my broken DVD player and my old toaster, as well as an electric fan heater which of course I wouldn’t dream of using, even if it did work.

And I bet I’m not that unusual. More than a million tonnes of electrical waste is produced in the UK every year, but most of us already have a strong instinct that broken electronics shouldn’t just be thrown in the bin. That’s why we squirrel away things like not-quite-working amplifiers in our sheds and cupboards. I expect you can easily exceed my little collection of defunct gadgets from your own attics.

I suggest we all have a clear-out and get down to our local designated WEEE collection facilities asap. A phone call to my local council this morning revealed that – indeed – the recycling centre had acquired ‘some new bins’ for this stuff. Oh yes, my weekend is going to be so exciting.

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