|
|
|
|
For the last few decades, our everyday lives have become significantly dependent on the use of electrical and electronic products. The rapid growth in ICT has led to an improvement in quality of life, but simultaneously to a decrease in the products lifetime. Also, many products which used to work on mechanical energy have been replaced by ones employing electricity. As a result of the both streams, a great amount of waste of electrical and electronic equipment (e-waste) has been generated.
 
Electrical and electronic products are composed with various types of technical resources, such as metals, glasses, plastics and other synthetic substances. Some of the materials are toxic and hazardous, thus they threaten human health and safety as well as the natural environment, if they are land-filled or treated inappropriately. In order to prevent such problems, a series of European legislations on electrical and electronic equipment, such as Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), the Restriction of the use of certain Hazardous Substances in electrical and electronic equipment (RoHS), and Energy using Products (EuP), came into force.
Since 2006, GrAT has carried out an international project titled “Development of a Standard Recycling Rate Estimation Method and Design Guidelines”, together with Yeung Nam University in Korea. It is funded by Korea Ministry of Knowledge Economy (former Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy), Korea National Cleaner Production Centre (KNCPC)
The project aims to support SMEs to comply successfully with the EU WEEE Directive. In order to achieve the recycling and recovery targets defined in the Directive, producers need to pay more attention to their material composition and structure of parts.
One of the main outcomes is a "practical recycling quota estimation tool for producers". With simple data structure and interface, the tool supports product designers involved in a value chain to figure out the recycling and recovery potential of their equipment. It has been designed to be compatible with MS Excel.
http://weee.or.kr
During the project, other issues which are rather fundamental have been recognised:
1. Only a quarter of e-waste generated in Europe is actually processed in Europe. Most of the rest is shipped to Asia, Africa and South America to be recycled, but under problematic circumstances.
2. There is a large discrepancy between the respective efforts of producers and recyclers for better recycling. Current endeavor of manufacturers in ‘Design for Recycling (DfR)’ mainly aims the easiness in the manual disassembly, which is not feasible in the actual recycling industry due to high labour cost.
3. The political instrument such as legal forces should be developed from the more systematic perspective, instead of material- or product-level.
What we see as our future tasks are:>
4. Improvement of the situation of unorganised recycling sectors in developing countries
5. Feasibility study of reversed logistics of e-waste collection
6. Development of financial instrument (e.g. leasing) for true producers responsibility for electrical and electronic products
7. Closing the technical resource loop by bridging producers and recyclers of electrical and electronic products
|
|
|
|
|
