Green IT Toolkit

Story: Millions of Britain's PCs dumped at tips

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I can believe this

It's a crime really. And to be perfectly honest with you, doesn't supprise me in the slightest. The infrastructure isn't in place. Producer Compliance schemes are supposed to be joined by manufacturers and these used to pay for Approved Authorised Tratment facilities to collect, treat and issue evidence against the quantities of waste WEEE.

Lets get down to the brunt of it here. I'm in the thick of the industry and this week alone, know of one charity IT recycler/ reseller and one major IT recycling firm with 26m GBP investment who are going under and will be closing their doors this year (that's one year after the WEEE directive came into force). Maybe they jumped the gun, thought that customers would come flooding to their doors, or simply grew their expectations faster than the customer base could keep up!.

In my opinion, the cash investments have been made (privately) at the processing end (the coal face to put it bluntly) and there's no infrastructure in place to take the IT/ WEEE equipment from the consumer and get it to the processors (AATFs).

Until the infrastructure/ local authority agreements are in place, the WEEE directive is going to stumble along. May be a good idea to circumvent the idea of the Producer Comliance scheme all together and have recyclers dealing direct with manufacters (my contacts at the Environment Agency will not be pleased with me saying that!). The only downside to this will be a lack of evidence being passed back to the EU- yet more fines for the UK!

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