Article reproduced, with kind permission, from the July 2001 issue of the Institute of Wastes Management Journal "Wastes Management".

RLCL Study Tour - Holland & Belgium, May 2001

By Chris Davey (Chairman LARAC/West Sussex County Council)
and Robert Walker (Robert Long Consultancy Limited)

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MIREC, Eindhoven

In The Netherlands there are two ways for WEEE to be collected for recycling and recovery:-

There are currently about 60 regional WEEE collection centres in the Netherlands (of which Netwerk at Dordrecht is one), but once collected industry is responsible for its processing. The Netherlands is by no means alone in having legal compulsion ahead of the WEEE Directive, Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden have similar laws, Italy and Finland soon will have and Germany has a voluntary scheme.

Although WEEE can be returned to retailers when buying new products, 80% of WEEE is collected at CA sites. This is partly because the customer is offered a 5-10% discount on their new purchases if they do not ask the retailer to dispose of their WEEE and partly because the new purchase and waste disposal are rarely undertaken at exactly the same time. It takes Netwerk two weeks to collect a curtain-sider lorry load of 300 cathode ray tubes (CRTs - TVs/computer monitors) which are stored in large wooden crates which fold flat when empty. Fridges and freezers are tightly packed into standard 20 ft ISO containers. The collected WEEE is transferred to reprocessing plants such as MIREC at Eindhoven. 

At MIREC, every single item of WEEE received is weighed, recorded by product type and manufacturer before it is dismantled. During the processing the glass, plastics, electrical components, metals (Cu, Fe and Al) and hazardous components are separated. Each operative handles over 120 'units' of equipment each day, equivalent of 300kg/hour (e.g. TV = 1 unit, monitor = ½ unit because of the difference in size). 

	Complex fractions such as circuit boards are separated during the dismantling process, then cut into 5-6cm pieces, hand-sorted and then further shredded into ½-3cm pieces. This material is passed through ferrous and eddy-current separators and apart from the ferrous and aluminium yield, the residue produced is a valuable commodity worth £500/t for its copper and precious metals content. This value is dependent on the quality of the received products and the prevailing metal market prices.
	CRTs are expensive to recycle and MIREC have to charge a gate-fee. The facility processes 3000 'units' of glass WEEE every day. Most of the weight of CRTs is glass. The CRTs go through a largely automated process (at MIREC's subsidiary company De Valk Glass in Echt, 60 miles from Eindhoven) to remove the rubber and other components before being washed to remove the phosphorus and crushed. The glass is recycled into the cones of new CRTs or into ceramic products such as floor tiles where it is used as a substitute for feldspar;
	Plastics have a very poor market, but it is hoped that this will develop. At present higher grade plastics are crushed in a 36 cu yd skip then delivered to recyclers for upgrading and reuse. The low quality plastics are incinerated.

It will come as no surprise that some of the WEEE is profitable to recycle, but some costs the original manufacturer to have it recycled. The registering and weighing allows MIREC to track each piece of WEEE through the system and set up an account for each of the 125 EEE companies operating in the Netherlands and working with MIREC. For each new TV sold in the Netherlands, £7 goes into a central fund to pay for the management of WEEE. The original equipment producers are not directly involved in the business of reuse and recycling unless their products are of high value when second hand or if the items are of strategic importance; most companies simply contract this service out.

As a general rule, the more miniaturised a piece of electronic equipment, the higher quality, and therefore the more valuable, the precious metals it contains. This explains why old telecoms equipment is high value and can give a good return to the deliverer. IT equipment can be accepted with a zero gate-fee or MIREC may even pay for it if delivered in large quantities. However a gate-fee has to be levied for WEEE from white goods, which makes up 2/3rds by weight of the Dutch WEEE arisings. 

Work stations and production areas are cleaned down at the end of each day as a measure to control dust, the fear being that the employees will be exposed to hazardous dust, especially cadmium. As well as bag filters throughout the plant, personal sampling and air sampling are standard practice. 

MIREC also handles large quantities of production waste, reject products and residues from EEE manufacturers and even runs industrial auctions of used equipment and trades in metals. One specialist line is the recovery of parts for reuse, in particular from business to business waste. Such recovery is done in secure areas where all items are kept under lock and key

MIREC's Eindhoven plant handles 40-50% of the 915,000tpa brown and grey WEEE arising in the Netherlands, refurbishing some, stripping some for parts and recycling/recovering the rest. MIREC was established 50 years ago and has subsidiaries in Germany, Holland, France, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland and now the UK. A facility is due to be opened by the end of 2001 at Foss Cross in Gloucestershire at a former United Waste Services transfer station. MIREC is a subsidiary of Watco of Belgium, but with the recent reorganisation of its ultimate parent company, the Suez Lyonaise Group, it will keep its name but fall under the SITA umbrella. The company plans further facilities in Silicon Glen in Scotland, as well as in Dublin, Spain and Italy by next year.

MIREC's UK plant will be looking to take up to 5,000tpa for disassembly at the outset and, with only 20% of inputs becoming shredder product, to eventually produce 10,000-15,000tpa shredded WEEE after a period of sustained growth. This would mean taking in 5 times more than this by weight.

Conclusions

What was immediately apparent about both the MIREC and Netwerk facilities was the enormous amount of space they had for their operations. The MIREC facility was admittedly a central processing facility serving the whole of the Netherlands (16M people) and serving other MIREC operations in Belgium and the Nordic countries, but it is significant that we do not have similarly sized facilities in the UK. Even the Netwerk facility, which was little more than a CA site and transfer station covered 20,000m² for a population of 120,000 people. Perhaps we need to take note and plan accordingly for the UK. 

The WEEE Directive will have far reaching implications for the way WEEE is handled in the UK. The Dutch scheme sets a good example for the UK to follow, not only in terms of the technical logistics but more importantly in terms of the involvement of all the partners concerned.

The Directive had its first reading at the European Parliament in mid-May and the DTI expects to have another round of public consultation on the UK implementation of the Directive when a Common Position is agreed (perhaps in June). The Directive would then need to navigate through a second reading and perhaps even conciliation before giving 18 months for implementation in UK law. The two key amendments adopted by the Parliament in May were to reduce to 2½ years the time allowed for establishing a system of collection and increasing the amount of WEEE to be collected from 4kg to 6kg/person/year.



Robert Walker is a Consultant with RLCL, working on planning, commercial/business development and recycling/recovery projects. enviro.southampton@wyg.com

Chris Davey is the Chairman of LARAC and Policy Development & Recycling Manager with West Sussex County Council. cdavey@westsussex.gov.uk