Summary
The European Union has issued orders for all of its member nations to recycle all electronics and appliances, but the UK has decided to delay its implementation of the order so that they can prepare for all the goods they will receive. Rather than risk having piles of computers, TVs and washing machines building up across the country, the UK will wait on enforcing the order until companies are prepared for the influx of the estimated half a million tons of goods to be recycled.
Original source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1445451,00.html
Details
Memories of the fridge mountain which built up as a result of the UK's lack of preparations to recycle fridges under similar EU orders have spurred officials at the Department of Trade and Industry to breach EU law rather than risk another fiasco.
The government is proposing to delay recycling until January 2006.
Meanwhile 90% of household electrical goods will continue to be dumped in landfill sites.
The directive on waste electronic and electrical equipment is designed to prevent a million tons of household electrical equipment being sent to landfill sites each year.
It forces high street retailers such as Dixons to offer recycling of old equipment to customers.
But the volumes of electrical equipment being dumped each year - 2m televisions, 3m fridges and freezers, 2m computers, and 2.2m washing machines - meant traders feared they would be overwhelmed.
Consumer electronics alone are responsible for 40% of the lead found in landfill sites and watercourses, contaminating drinking water supplies.
Cadmium accumulates in the human body, in particular the kidneys.
In addition, about 3,000 tons of methylated mercury is released into the environment each year.
Yesterday Whitehall official Chris Tollardy, who is in charge of implementation of the European directive, wrote to a consortium of retailers conceding that "the government has encountered major practical difficulties in meeting the directive's legal deadline of 13 August 2005 for implementation of its obligations on producers and retailers".
The Recycling Electrical Producers' Industry Consortium (Repic) which includes household names like Indesit, Bosch, Siemens, Hoover Candy, Panasonic, Philips, Sony, Electrolux, Kenwood, Hitachi and Sharp, want consumers to pay a "
recycling fee" when they buy equipment to pay for the cost of disposing of old units.
The government has a poor record on implementing EU environmental directives on time.
About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health author and award-winning journalist with a strong interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to help us all heal He has authored more than 1,800 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, and he is well known as the creator of popular downloadable preparedness programs on financial collapse, emergency food storage, wilderness survival and home defense skills. Adams is an honest, independent journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he writes about or the companies he promotes. In 2010, Adams co-founded NaturalNews.com, a natural health video sharing site that has now grown in popularity. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also a veteran of the software technology industry, having founded a personalized mass email software product used to deliver email newsletters to subscribers. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and regularly pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates.
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Saturday, April 02, 2005
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