WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) is a government directive, it came in to force in 2002. The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive and the RoHS Directive became European Law in February 2003. The WEEE Directive set collection, recycling and recovery targets for all types of electrical goods, while the RoHS Directive set restrictions upon European manufacturers as to the material content of new electronic equipment placed on the market.
The directive places WEEE into a few categories, the first being historic and non-historic. Historic WEEE is equipment placed on the market prior to 2005 which places the responsibility on the owner of the equipment to arrange for its recycling, and non-historic WEEE is when the responsibility of the producer/distributor to make provisions for its collection and recycling.
The WEEE directive has 10 categories of WEEE:
- Large household appliances
- Small household appliances
- IT and telecommunications equipment
- Consumer equipment
- Lighting equipment
- Electrical and electronic tools
- Toys, leisure and sports equipment
- Medical devices
- Monitoring and control instruments
- Automatic dispensers
Before the WEEE directive in the UK, waste electronic and electrical equipment was disposed of in the household waste stream, which lead to the introduction of Hazardous Waste Regulations. Hazardous electronic wastes include:
- Uninterruptable power supplies, lead-acid batteries
- Cathode ray tubes (televisions, computer monitors)
- Fluorescent tubes, backlights to laptop screens, thin-film transistors
- Electrical/electronic equipment containing polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)
- Fridges and freezers, due to chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), an ozone-depleting substance. As of 2012 revisions to the regulations, all refrigerants are considered Hazardous.
All items of WEEE that are put into household waste recycling centres are then collected by or delivered to approved authorised treatment facilities (AATFs), where it gets weighed and categorized in accordance with the directive.
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