Defra Backing EEESafe as a UN Key Partner
waste electricals
It now appears that the WEEEEForum http://www.weee-forum.org is intending to foist on the UK, a standard for EU Conformity. The European standards organisations will translate the WEEELABEX requirements into formal EN standards that confer a set of rules for all operators on the market to comply with WEEE legislation.
The WEEELABEX project aimed to design, on the one hand, a set of European standards (or ‘normative requirements’) with respect to the collection, sorting, storage, transportation, preparation for re-use, treatment, recycling and disposal of all kinds of WEEE, and, on the other hand, a set of rules and procedures that will guarantee harmonised conformity verification. The standards and the WEEELABEX conformity verification organisation will level the playing field by making environmental performancemore transparent.
In our view, this is all very well, but there seems to be no indication of their intent to ensure where EEE or WEEE can be left in local communities, to help service the impoverished people of each locality in any of the countries.
The organisations that we see who are from the UK, are REPIC and WEEE Ireland. We ask consumers to ensure your local and national Retailers are not giving old Appliances to them.
We have already flagged up on our Website, that over six million electrical items are thrown away every year in the UK and it is estimated that over half of them are still working or could easily be repaired. There is a real Danger here that these Compliance Schemes in the UK and in the rest of the EU (where poverty still exists in large numbers) are just going to continue to be Hungry Corporate Entities who show know respect to the needs of local people.
According to the Childrens Charity Barnados, nearly half of all children in the poorest fifth of all households in the Uk, are in families who can’t afford to replace broken electrical goods. With these compliance schemes just taking the items away from every locality, we ask every consumer to ensure that old appliances are sent to local EEE Safe Centres to be assessed for reuse. In these centres, parts can be reused to facilitate lower costs and where Training Centres are established, more people can be trained in reparation skills with postive outcomes for the locals in the form of more tested and refurbished units to purchase at low cost.
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