Ninety percent of electronic waste currently ends up in disposal or shredding without any pre-treatment.
However as part of the compromise, producers of electronic waste will benefit from simplified reporting requirements.
This means processing electronic waste properly is often more a service industry rather than profit-from-product industry.
The ultimate goal is to decrease the amount of electronic waste that ends up in landfills every year.
Under the agreement reached with member states, 65% of electronic waste must be collected and recycled by 2019.
Electronic waste can contain toxic heavy metals and hazardous chemicals that are handled by workers, some of them children.
As consumers, we're being told to take all our electronic waste to the local civic amenity site where the council should provide us with a special skip.
The second reading agreement includes a clampdown on the illegal shipment of electronic waste to countries where it may be processed in conditions hazardous to workers and the environment.
Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik said that electronic waste was the fastest growing waste in Europe, and that the revisions to the directive would go some way towards reducing economic burdens.
But with our appetite for these consumer goods continuing to grow, experts believe we are still going to have our work cut out dealing with our electric and electronic waste.
This would mean that the annual production of electronic waste would be slashed from the current six million tons to 1.5 million tons, according to EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstr m.
This hit a key demographic that would have been missed by social media, a demo that is probably not aware it needs to recycle electronic waste responsibly in the first place: seniors.
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While this portion may seem small in the aggregate, the volume of electronic waste is climbing so rapidly that the percentages are virtually guaranteed to follow barring a significant change in current trends.
First, electronic waste is currently hazardous waste in that it contains lead, mercury, cadmium, brominated flame retardants etc, which are integrally mixed into components and cannot therefore be easily separated from the non-hazardous components.
It was pointed out during the debate that of the 53 million tonnes of electronic waste generated in 2009, only 13% was collected and recycled, with the rest being sent to landfill, incinerated or illegally exported.
Reck wrote in her research that even in the European Union, where legislative efforts have tried to boost the collection of electrical and electronic waste, only 25% to 40% is collected and treated in the official system.
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Groups that lobbied to keep the exemption argued that making unlocking illegal is anti-competitive and could result in costlier phones and more electronic waste since some consumers would have to buy a new device to switch carriers.
Electronic waste currently constitutes only four percent of total municipal waste, but it is growing by almost 30 percent every five years or three times as fast as the average growth of municipal waste, according to the Commission.
For decades, the export of electronic waste from the United States and Europe to Asia has raised concerns about the impact on local environments and the low-paid workers who dismantle toxic-laden computers and other gear to recover valuable metals and parts.
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Currently there is a groundswell of real US electronics recyclers (not exporters that call themselves recyclers) that are demanding a US law (the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act) for toxic electronic waste comparable to what the rest of the world is already doing under the Basel Convention rules.
Participants in that treaty tried to finalize e-waste guidelines, but they were not adopted because some developed countries and the electronics industry would not agree without adding loopholes to allow repairable electronic waste to be exempted, said advocacy group IPEN, a global network of more than 700 public interest non-governmental organizations.
Why is it that some people believe that any time spent on an electronic device is a waste?
Preventative medicine, electronic records and slashing waste would make for a cheaper system.
The debate on 3 February 2011 was to update the 2003 Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive.
E-waste is electrical and electronic equipment that is at the end of its useful life.
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