§ Mr. HobanTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what assessment she has made of the availability of treatment systems to disassemble waste electrical and electronic equipment. [42597]
§ Mr. Meacher[holding answer 12 March 2002]: The European Community Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is still in draft.
At present, the UK collects more WEEE than the forthcoming Directive is likely to require. There are adequate facilities for processing existing disposals of WEEE through a wide range of re-use facilities, treatment sites and shredder operations licensed or registered exempt through the Environment Agency. These include community based refurbishment initiatives for household electrical items, scrap metal processors who take in white goods and shredders which take a range of WEEE in addition to white goods.
There have been new facilities established recently to deal with specific types of WEEE, such as the reprocessing of fluorescent tubes, refurbishment of personal computers and mobile telephones. Several of these newer operations undertake the disassembly of any equipment which cannot be refurbished for re-use in order to re-use components or to minimize cross-contamination during the recycling of different types of material.