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Ian, The WEEE Directive is (as with all EU directives) an instruction to Member States to pass national laws that implement the essential provisions of the directive. This is a long-winded way of saying that the measures relating to recycling will differ between, say, the UK and Germany. Therefore, the chances are that there will be no single answer to your question that applies across all Member States. National legislation implimenting the WEEE Directive does not yet exist in all Member States. For instance, in the UK the consultation process for implementing the WEEE and RoHS directives has only recently started: see the DTI web site at http://www.dti.gov.uk/sustainability/weee/ According to the DTI's consultation proposals, the UK will be "applying a light touch approach to implementing" the eco-design requirements of the WEEED. Other countries may be producing (or may already have produced) national legislation that does not adopt such a 'light touch' to eco-design. {In case you don't keep up with the standards scene, IEC have just set up a new Technical Committee scoped to look at environmental issues. Our lives are set to become even more ‘interesting’}. So, to answer your question "is this actually happening on the ground" the answer is no, except in the case of those companies who recycle products voluntarily. Perhaps we’ll hear from a few such companies to see how they are getting on and what approaches they’re taking? While protection of the environment is important to Europeans (more so than it is to George W it seems) it is also recognised that measures need to be affordable. It seems to me that scrap from products collected under the WEEED’s provision will have an economic value. To turn this scrap back into raw material useful for making new product will require recycling. If the scrap is relatively pure it will require less recycling and so will command a higher price. Throwing a mixture of products into a great big grinding machine is therefore not yield the highest value scrap. Equally, employing hordes of people to manually separate every part of an equipment into its components is likely to cost so much that nobody will purchase the resulting scrap. Regards, Richard Hughes This message is from the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society emc-pstc discussion list. IEEE PSES Main Website: http://www.ieee-pses.org/ To post a message send your e-mail to emc-p...@ieee.org Instructions for use of the list server: http://listserv.ieee.org/listserv/request/user-guide.html List rules: http://www.ieee-pses.org/listrules.html For help, send mail to the list administrators: Ron Pickard: emc-p...@hypercom.com Dave Heald: emc_p...@symbol.com For policy questions, send mail to: Richard Nute: ri...@ieee.org Jim Bacher: j.bac...@ieee.org All emc-pstc postings are archived and searchable on the web at: http://www.ieeecommunities.org/emc-pstc
