Introduction and Overview

MARTIN GOOSEY

1 Introduction

In recent years there has been growing concern about the negative impacts that industry and its products are having on both society and the environment in which we live. The concept of sustainability and the need to behave in a more sustainable manner has therefore received increasing attention. With the world's population growing rapidly and generally improving wealth, the consumption of materials, energy and other resources has been accelerating in a way that cannot be sustained. With issues such as global warming also now more openly acknowledged as being significantly influenced by our activities, there is a clear need to address the way society uses, and often wastes, valuable resources. In short, we have to behave more sustainably. There are a number of useful definitions of sustainability and the World Commission on Environment & Development has defined it as:

'Meeting the needs of the present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'

This is a good top-level definition but, in the context of industry, it needs to be more specifically focused to encompass the typical requirements of businesses and a more appropriate definition is:

'Adopting strategies and activities that meet the needs of the enterprise and its stakeholders today while protecting, sustaining and enhancing the human and natural resources that will be needed in the future'

One area in which there has been much concern about the lack of sustainable behaviour is in the manufacture, use and disposal of electrical and electronic products. The electronics industry provides us with the devices that have become so essential to our modern way of life and yet it also represents an area where the opportunities to operate in a sustainable way have not yet been properly realised. In fact, much electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) is typically characterised by a number of factors, including improved performance and reduced cost in each new generation of product, that actually encourage unsustainable behaviour. Products such as mobile phones are often treated as fashion items and are replaced long before their design lifetimes have expired; see Figure 1.

With products increasingly having short lifecycles, using hazardous materials and processes, and generating waste both during manufacture and at end of life, the manufacturers of EEE have become an increasingly popular and easy target for environmental groups such as Greenpeace, who have embarrassingly highlighted the deficiencies of many large international electronics companies. There has also been much recent negative publicity for manufacturers about the eventual fate of their products at end of life and the effective dumping of electrical and electronic waste in Third World and Far Eastern countries. Clearly, while western society has demonstrated that it is keen to embrace the benefits that modern electrical and electronic products can bring, when it comes to end of life and disposal, we have been happy to allow other parts of the world to deal with the problem.

In an acknowledgement that society in general, and the electrical/electronics industry in particular, needs to operate in a more responsible and sustainable manner, the European Commission (EC) has, over the last few years, introduced a suite of Producer Responsibility legislation to address the problem. This is being driven by the EC to achieve a number of objectives aimed at a more sustainable approach to resource use and a reduction in the quantity of waste going to landfill. It also aims to divert end-of-life products for re-use, recycling and other forms of recovery, as well as proscribing the use of certain hazardous materials and reducing energy consumption through the product lifecycle. Interestingly, Producer Responsibility is an extension of the 'polluter pays' principle and it places responsibility for end-of-life management on the original producer. In summary, Producer Responsibility legislation aims to encourage producers to design, manufacture and market products that:

• reduce or eliminate the use of hazardous materials • use greater amounts of recyclate • can be more easily treated at end of life • minimise waste • can be re-used • use fewer resources throughout their life

Within Europe, there are numerous Directives and Regulations aimed at implementing Producer Responsibility and key examples important to the electrical and electronics industries include the WEEE, RoHS and Energy-using Products Directives, as well as the REACH Regulations.

There is clearly a need for the electronics industry to operate in a more sustainable manner, both to meet the requirements of the increasingly stringent legislation and to satisfy the needs of customers who also expect industry to have high environmental standards. The electronics industry can achieve these aims through the adoption of new manufacturing processes, the use of new materials and the development of enhanced recovery and re-use strategies at end of life. While this can already often be achieved by industry itself, there are also longer-term opportunities that will only be addressed via further research and development.

This opening chapter gives a broad introduction to the issues of sustainability within the context of end-of-life electrical and electronic products. The following text seeks to outline the nature of electrical and electronic equipment waste, the scale of the problem and current practices to deal with it. The way that Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) has been, and continues to be, treated is described and details of new, more sustainable approaches to waste treatment are outlined. It is clear that EEE needs to be considered in a more holistic way, with a 'cradle to cradle' rather than 'cradle to grave' approach. Recent Producer Responsibility legislation, largely led by Europe, has set the future agenda and, globally, there is now an acknowledgment both of the scale of the problem and of the need for innovative solutions.

2 WEEE – The Scale of the Problem

WEEE has been Europe's fastest-growing waste stream for a number of years and it has been estimated that an average UK citizen born in 2003 will be responsible for generating around 8 tonnes of WEEE during her or his lifetime. The quantities of WEEE produced are both very large and growing. For...