In March, the government in the United Kingdom (U.K.) announced a delay of the implementation of the complicated Waste Electronics and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) and Restriction of certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) laws. The European Union (EU) passed the WEEE directive with a legal deadline of August 13, 2005, for all electronics manufacturers to take responsibility to recycle products returned to them at the end of their lifecycle. Now, the U.K. says they won’t be making the legal deadline, but intend to implement the WEEE law in January 2006 instead. Germany and several other EU member states have also delayed implementation of the directives due to “major practical difficulties.”
The deadline for EU member states to transpose the RoHS directive into law was August 13, 2004. Only Greece met the deadline. The U.K. government has stated it will create WEEE laws complying with the directive in summer 2005. The U.K. also pledges to implement the part of the WEEE directive relating to the marking of equipment with the “made-by” date.
Electronics manufacturers such as Hewlett Packard and Xerox welcome the delay, saying the level of complexity in the directives require many details to be resolved before it can work. Bob Hendrickson, a Xerox engineer, commented on how difficult it is to find RoHS-compliant parts. “Xerox has used some of the same connectors for 40 years, so this is a time of unprecedented change here. Wire is also of great concern,” he says.
For the EU member states creating the legislation to comply with WEEE and RoHS, the devil is in the details. Who takes away an old appliance when it’s replaced? And who pays for the recycling? Most often, when an old appliance, such as a Maytag dishwasher, is replaced by a new FancyWash-brand dishwasher, the consumer typically must pay a recycling charge to FancyWash, who delivers the new appliance and takes away the old one to be recycled. But if the cost for that recycling doubles or triples, the intention of the WEEE directive is that the manufacturer must be responsible for that cost-not the consumer. The whole idea was to give manufacturers a financial incentive to design ecologically conservative, easy-to-recycle products.
A current, major obstacle for the U.K. is specifying the maximum concentration values for the substances restricted by the directive, namely lead, cadmium, mercury, bromide flame retardants, and hexavalent chromium. Another major obstacle for the government is the lack of consensus on a National Clearing House for recycling, and what practical functions it should have.
The EU has set up a complicated and difficult task for its member states to legislate and implement the WEEE and RoHS laws. This practical difficulty should be a lesson to the U.S., and American legislators and others around the globe should pay close attention to how EU member states sort out the mess that is lead-free electronics.
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Valerie Coffey
Editor-in-Chief
valeriec@pennwell.com
