Half a Million Tonnes of WEEE Missing from UK Estimates
C-Tech Innovation, a technology development and multi-disciplinary consultancy company based in Capenhurst near Chester, has just completed a six-month project with recycling consultancy firm London Remade, that calculated the levels of business-to-business Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE) generated in London each year.
WEEE is a complex waste stream that often requires several levels of reprocessing and recycling to ensure maximum value is recovered. To help ensure sufficient and suitable reprocessing capacity is available, London Remade, a leading adviser and consultant to London boroughs and businesses on the subject of recycling, commissioned C-Tech Innovation to perform a study regarding the quantity of B2B WEEE generated in London.
While London Remade had a good understanding of the levels of WEEE being generated in the capital on a domestic level, the company wanted to discover the figures for London's businesses. Kate Nelson, Senior Project Manager at London Remade explains: “We had been working with several WEEE reprocessors and reuse organisations in London and we knew that approximately 170,000 tonnes of domestic WEEE were being generated each year, but we struggled to find data on business-to-business WEEE. We felt that this information was critical to assist our clients in their decision making on site location, logistics and appropriate technologies.”
The study was built on C-Tech’s end-of-life WEEE software tool and identified the quantity of WEEE and its composition, thus enabling recovery scenarios to be run once a full WEEE analysis was completed. David Gardner, Senior Project Manager at C-Tech Innovation comments: “We worked with London Remade for around six months, starting in May 2007. We used a mass balance approach to ascertain the overall tonnage of electrical equipment sold in the UK. This was broken down to calculate the WEEE arisings in each borough of London, split down by the ten WEEE product groups. We were able to do this by using information from the Office of National Statistics to calculate domestic and non-domestic WEEE arisings, and cross-check the results for domestic WEEE using other independent studies.”
“The final results showed that more than 890,000 tonnes per year of B2B WEEE is being generated by the UK as a whole, with the London boroughs generating around 15% of this (132,000 tonnes per year). The UK total tonnage is around three times greater than the Environment Agency’s estimate in 2007, which is based on the number of companies registering their waste through the EA. This suggests that companies are still not yet appreciating the implications of the WEEE Directive and are continuing to dispose of waste through traditional channels,” adds Gardner.
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