by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

Fancy a new hi-fi after December 31, 2006?

Just head down to your nearest medical equipment shop.

A shop, you ask, selling medical equipment? Yes. That’s right.

The High Street will be full of them. They will be piled high with “imaging monitors” (televisions, to you and me), digital scanning devices (video cameras) and occupational therapy aids (computer games consoles).

The reason? It all comes down to the European Union Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, whose acronym, WEEE, just about sums it up.

The aim of the directive is laudable: to encourage the recycling of electrical equipment. But the means by which it attempts to achieve this is, in common with a lot of the bureaucratic burdens on business these days, somewhat bizarre.

From December 31, 2006, the directive demands that the manufacturers of electrical equipment must ensure that certain quantities of their products are recycled and, of course, they get to pick up the tab too.

Even if the rules sound reasonable so far, this is where they depart from common sense: the required targets are set in terms of percentage weight.

So, for example, a lighting equipment manufacturer will have to make sure that 50 kg out of every 100 kg of the materials which make up his products are recycled.

Computer manufacturers will have to ensure they recycle 65 per cent and fridge manufacturers 75 per cent.

It doesn’t take a great deal of ingenuity to work out there is a huge loophole at the heart of this legislation.

It costs a great deal of money and a great deal of bother to collect and recycle nasty materials like cadmium and mercury.

Certain other materials, on the other hand, are extremely easy to recycle. Why not, for example, fill the cavities in your televisions with bags of sand: at the end of the product’s life, you simply take out the bags of sand and put them into new televisions, thereby recycling them at a stroke?

Having recycled the appropriate proportion of your goods, you simply fling the nasty stuff like plastics and heavy metals into landfill.

There is another weakness: defence and medical equipment, for some reason, is excluded from the targets.

Therefore, if you can get away with reclassifying your gizmos as armaments or as pieces of medical kit, you needn’t bother with recycling targets at all.

Manufacturers may try to get around the directive by dressing up their toasters as land mines, as we end up with the reverse of the situation in the early 1990s, when Saddam Hussein was attempting to smuggle components of his “super-gun” disguised as sewage pipes.

The preamble to the directive is very clear about the problem at hand. “The amount of WEEE generated in the community is growing rapidly,” it warns.

Furthermore, “the objective of improving the management of WEEE cannot be achieved by member states acting individually.” Indeed not.

“This directive should apply without prejudice to community legislation on safety and health requirements protecting all actors in contact with WEEE.”

No doubt the bureaucrats had a good giggle writing all this stuff. It is less of a joke to those who have to deal with the consequences.

If the directive does succeed in cutting the quantity of copper and silicon used in European electrical goods, the one thing it certainly isn’t going to cut down on is waste paper.

The directive states: “Member states shall ensure that for the purpose of calculating these targets, producers or third parties acting on their behalf keep records of the mass of WEEE.”

In other words, and stripped of the lavatorial humour that goes down well in corridors of Brussels, businesses are going to have to compile records of the weight of every single component of every single product they produce.

Further, they must trace what happens to each of those components when the product is eventually dumped.

If the EU attempted to subject consumers to such a bureaucratic task there would be uproar: anyone fancy spending dustbin day weighing their items of rubbish individually and filing away the records for future reference?

The only way the EU can bring such legislation is to place the burden on business and leave the consumer unscathed. Or, as the directive puts it: “Private householders will be able to return WEEE without charge.”