Electrical & Electronic Equipment

From 13 August 2005, electrical and electronic equipment manufacturers, own branders (e.g. retailers selling under their own brand), importers and exporters (termed “producers” under the Directive) will all become financially responsible for the disposal of their own WEEE.

These legal obligations include the separate collection, treatment, recovery/recycling and environmentally sound disposal of EEE. Costs may be shared with users for non-household (business) WEEE.

Recycling and recovery targets are specified for separately collected WEEE, per 10 product categories. WEEE shall also be labelled with the crossed wheelie bin to encourage users not to discard WEEE with the municipal waste, but to use a separate collection system. The Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment (RoHS) Directive 2002/95/EC runs in parallel with the WEEE Directive. However, it focuses solely on four hazardous metals and two types of brominated flame retardants that are commonly found in electrical and electronic equipment: Lead, Mercury, Cadmium, Hexavalent chromium, Polybrominated biphenyls, Polybrominated diphenyl ethers.

The RoHS Directive's scope closely follows the 10 product categories of the WEEE Directive but includes filament light bulbs and household luminaires, while excluding medical devices and monitoring & control equipment (WEEE categories 8 & 9).

Intertek strongly recommends testing your EEE to the RoHS Directive as soon as possible, as changing materials to eliminate the RoHS substances may require lengthy product and process development work. For example, many non-lead solders require higher operating temperatures which could damage heat-sensitive components. So it could be a tight squeeze to achieve a RoHS-compliant product by 1 July 2006!!

Download our information leaflet Hazardous Substances in Electrical & Electronic Equipment.

For more information visit Intertek Labtest or send an e-mail to weee@intertek.com