The Death of the Local Repairer?
We agree with Dr Michael Warhurst of Friends of the Earth. In answer to the question, “what is best, to put waste in the ground or burn it for energy?” He says before you put in in the ground if you are going to have to landfill, you should maximise all the removable recyclables.
At EEESafe it’s why we’re encouraging public involvement to help us keep the Spares and Whole Appliances in the Local Community, so that we can generate work for local repairers and create jobs for local communities. Why not ensure your Local Authority is aware of this and that they are not sending Community Assets to another part of the Country or abroad. Registering your current and new appliances with our FREE Register, will not only help protect your home from Fire but will raise awareness and help pursuade you to pass the old appliance to a local trades person, registered with EEESafe. Retaining these assets must be done at the lowest financial and environmental cost, as well as ensuring the work is done by Registered Competent and Skilled people.
Evidence exists demonstrating that Appliances being collected from HWRC sites in order to meet targets for collecting electrical waste, so that we reach the annual target of 20Kg per household from 4kg to prevent huge fines.
We find it amazing that we’re still chasing Recycling Targets in Electrical Waste, as well as other streams in order that we are not fined millions of pounds from the EU. Whatever we think of the EU, we’re all agreed that we need to reduce waste, but isn’t this hunger for waste somewhat of a dichotomy? “On the one hand we’re chasing targets and on the other we appear to have an insatiable desire from Producer Compliance Schemes who MUST have our Electrical Waste to feed their own Carbon Producing Factories. “
Collecting goods means fuel usage and air pollution, and to make matters worse, when Electrical Appliances are recovered at the plant, we go through exactly the same process to get the items back to a home where the appliance was collected from in the first place.
Why can’t we have the item repaired and recycled locally, reducing the carbon and financial costs of transport and at the same time meet the demands of local communities to purchase low cost appliances. We’ve done the research! Homeless Departments, Support Agencies and Charities are all looking to help their own communities, but the goods are taken away and there is shortage which has been the case for a long time. Get involved in helping your community by donating old or buying new appliances via EEESafe, because we’ll do our best to help your local community with the old appliance.
EEESafe is pioneering its Training in the community to teach the skills through certified and qualified training. Housing Associations and local authorities are amongst the first to engage with this, with expected results and metrics becoming available next year. However we have growing interest from other organisations who are looking to run an EEESafe Centre.
We need more communities to commit their old appliances to EEESafe, so we can give more work to local repairers. We can’t just have anyone fixing appliances. If they are not accountable and independently proven competent, we’ll have too many rogue traders and too many fires through lack of knowledge.
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