EU Law To Make Firms Pay For Appliance Recycling

The European Parliament approved a law that will make manufacturers of electrical and electronic goods in the European Union pay for the recycling of their old products.

The draft law, heavily amended by lawmakers, is now subject to final approval by EU governments, which have already agreed in principle to push ahead with what is being billed as Europe's biggest-ever boost for recycling.

The law aims to tackle the six million metric tons of appliances from refrigerators to mobile phones that the EU throws out each year, much of which ends up in waste dumps or incinerators, adding to the risk of air, land and water pollution.

The industry has estimated it could cost as much as $13.2 billion a year.

Under the rules, electronics firms will have to pay for the collecting and recycling of scrap -- affecting at least 10,000 firms. The EU will leave it up to individual governments to work out the details of carrying out collection and recycling.

``Today's decision is a milestone in European environmental legislation, which finally solves the problem of the ever rising quantities of both electronic and electrical waste in the EU,'' Alex de Roo, a Dutch Green deputy, said in a statement.

``It enshrines 'the polluter pays' principle firmly into European law.''

Engineering lobby group Orgalime welcomed parliament's vote as an improvement on what EU governments had proposed.

``The European Parliament has adopted a line which is much more consistent with European environmental policy,'' it said in a statement.

It particularly welcomed parliament's key amendment to make manufacturers take responsibility only for their own products, rather than pay into a collective fund to finance waste collection and recycling, the approach preferred by EU states.

Big manufacturers feared that a generalized approach would encourage rogue firms to disappear before they are forced to pay for recycling, leaving their more responsible competitors to pick up the bill.

To ensure firms do not disappear before paying up, parliament said producers and importers must pay a guarantee to ensure their products can be recycled even if the firm disappears.

Parliament and industry agree that such individual producer responsibility will encourage firms to ``eco-design'' their products to make them easy to recycle, reducing toxic chemicals, which are difficult to sort once products have been scrapped.

Because governments said they preferred a simpler collective financing scheme, they will now probably have to negotiate a compromise with parliament in the coming months.

Diplomats said it might take until the end of the year to finalize the law.

In another amendment, parliament increased the minimum quota of electrical and electronic waste to be collected to six kilograms per EU inhabitant a year from an original proposal of four kg.

It also voted to ban the use of ``clever chips'', which manufacturers can insert into products to make them impossible to recycle, for example by burning out printing heads on toner cartridges. Reuters