WEEE Forum exceeds the mark of 2 Mt of e-waste collection

Archiv – Europe | With more than 2 Mt of WEEE collected and properly treated and reported, 2009 has been recorded as a successful year for the 39 producer responsibility organisations of the WEEE Forum. This figure is up by 30% on 2008 when approximately 1.5 Mt was collected and properly treated. Europe | With more than 2 Mt of WEEE collected and properly treated and reported, 2009 has been recorded as a successful year for the 39 producer responsibility organisations of the WEEE Forum. This figure is up by 30% on 2008 when approximately 1.5 Mt was collected and properly treated.
’We are extremely satisfied having exceeded the 2 Mt mark’, comments Andreas Röthlisberger, President. ’The first and by far most important explanation is that all of our member organisations invested millions of euro’s in campaigns aimed at raising awareness among consumers and in building collection networks. It takes huge, sustained efforts to educate consumers on what to do with their end-of-life appliances’.
’In addition’, says Pascal Leroy, Secretary General, ’as the producer responsibility organisations share best practices amongst each other, good results are obtained while, at the same time, the development costs of new consumer awareness campaigns steadily decrease’.
Nevertheless, seen in the light of last year’s economic downturn, this performance is quite remarkable. The WEEE systems, all of them run on behalf of a community of 17,000 producers Europe-wide, showed stability and the consumers did not face increasing costs.
The WEEE Forum was founded in April 2002. In 2009, it counted 39 collection and recycling organisations from Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Germany, Greece, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. All organisations are open, non-profit oriented take-back systems run on behalf of a community of about 17,000 producers.