E - Waste – Multi Country

The management of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), or e-waste for short, has only fairly recently been added to the agendas of organisations responsible for waste management. Experiences around the globe have shown that the usual waste manager, the municipality, is not adequately equipped to handle this complex waste stream. Two new paradigms, however, are the principal drivers of change in the management of e-waste: the „closed loop economy“ and „extended producer responsibility“ (EPR). Some countries, mainly in Europe (e.g. Switzerland, Netherland and Belgium) started to experiment with new approaches to managing this hi-tech waste stream more than twenty years ago. A new international framework quickly took shape and the roles of important stakeholders dealing with the ‚end of life’ of WEEE evolved: producers accepted the end of life responsibility for their products and initiated producer responsibility organisations (PRO) to manage the material flows and the financing of unprofitable processing steps; the recycling industry went through a rapid evolution where specialists emerged for manual dismantling, mechanical processing, final refining of secondary raw materials amongst other tasks; the legislators carefully developed regulations defining responsibilities and promoting further improvement of the systems efficiency; and last, but not least, consumers, from the big corporate to the small household, increasingly wanted convenient and sustainable options for the disposal of e-waste. In developing countries and emerging economies this new paradigm shift has not become obvious until recently. Eye opening reports from NGOs such as the Basel Action Network [1], [2], [3] or Greenpeace [4], [5] about pollution from e-waste management in China, India and African countries started to appear in the mass media in the early 2000s. Poor people in the slums of the mega cities in the South tried to recover valuables from the e-waste stream but put themselves and their environment at risk [6]. As a result governments in these countries started to move e-waste up their priority list of environmental issues, which needed special legislative attention. In addition, various international cooperation initiatives were launched, including the Swiss e-Waste Programme, a pioneering project launched by the Swiss State Secretariat of Economic affairs with the aim of building “global knowledge partnerships in e-waste recycling” including China, India and South Africa [7], [8]. Meanwhile e-waste remains a high priority area within the Basel Convention and also within Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM). Furthermore the Stockholm Convention has started to address e-waste for management of polybrominated diphenylether containing material streams. Between 2007 and 2010 various international cooperation projects were launched by multilateral organizations (e.g. the Basel Convention Secretariat, SAICM, producers from the ICT (Information and communications technologies) industry, NGOs and governmental organizations.