Euro 2 million to enhance Europe’s e-cycling

Europe – The European Commission’€™s LIFE programme and industry partners will invest over Euro 2 million in a major R&D project to demonstrate innovative methods for the collection and reprocessing of e-scrap in order to boost the recovery of critical raw materials across Europe.

Under the Critical Raw Materials Closed Loop Recovery project, collection trials are to be delivered in the UK, Germany, Italy or Turkey and will focus on the collection of screens and monitors, ICT appliances, general consumer electronics and small mixed electronics owing to the richness of their metal content. Ultimately, it is hoped the three-and-a-half-year project will help achieve a 5% increase in the critical raw materials recovery rate by 2020 and a 20% upturn by 2030.

Project partners include the European Recycling Platform, the European Advanced Recycling Network, the Wuppertal Institute, the UK’s Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) and the Knowledge Transfer Network.

‘WRAP research has shown that, in the UK alone, we dispose of around 1.4 million tonnes of electrical and electronic products per year, and nearly 40% of this is landfilled,’ says the organisation’s director Marcus Gover.