The growing mountain of e-waste is an issue of increasing concern. WEEE and batteries containing hazardous substances give rise to serious environmental pollution and health concerns if not sustainably managed. Furthermore, every product that is not collected for reuse or de-polluted and recycled represents a wasted opportunity in terms of loss of natural resources and energy, a decreasing supply of (critical and/or valuable) materials to feed into manufacturing, which in turn puts the sector’s resilience, the EU economy’s autonomy and jobs in jeopardy. WEEE and battery legislation have laid down ambitious collection and recovery targets. Yet, after twenty years of WEEE rules Member States are falling short of reaching the EU minimum collection rate of 65%. The EU is committed to improving the small WEEE collection rate in the frameworks of the European Green Deal.
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With the aim of practically testing several methods and incentives to increase the collection rate of small WEEE and portable batteries the ECOSWEEE project proposes to design and implement 10 new pilots in 8 Member States to test the practicability, achievability, usefulness, and viability of different collection strategies and incentives. Strategies to be tested include deposit return, buy back, and other reward schemes, e.g. donation, postal services, other collection routes, involvement of online retail, financial aspects, and improvement of collection network. Another 12 ongoing or planned initiatives carried out by producer responsibility organisations (PROs) will also provide direct input to the project. Results of the pilot implementation will be analysed on the basis of pre-established criteria and indicators to measure the impacts and effectiveness (success) of the actions implemented, define potential areas of improvement and provide recommendations to policymakers at the member state and EU levels.
