Raising consumer awareness for WEEE recycling

Material Focus has published  new research that provides a complete and in-depth overview of the amount of electricals sold and electrical waste generated in the UK, across households and businesses.

Key findings of the research have identified that:

• A total of 1.65 million tonnes of electricals are sold in the UK every year
• We are producing 1.45 million tonnes of electrical waste every year in the UK alone
• At least 500,000 tonnes of waste electricals were lost through being thrown away, hoarded, stolen, or illegally exported

Recolight’s lamp recycling service

Recolight take on their Producer Member’s WEEE obligation by offering a free recycling service for lamps. With their Producer Members predominantly selling to the business market, this service is mainly offered to businesses.

Recolight and their business lamp collection partners agree, that offering this as a free service for business is the right thing to do. It’s helped Recolight achieve their annual collection target which is set each year by the government.

Increasing consumer lamp recycling

It is well established that to encourage consumer recycling, it needs to be easy.

But until now, an opt out meant that virtually all retailers could avoid their legal obligation to provide instore collection.

However, from the beginning of 2021, virtually all retailers will be required to provide a waste lamp take-back service when selling new lamps.  That is good news.  And although the requirement will also apply to electrical wholesalers, most of them already offer Recolight’s waste lamp take-back service.

National Awareness campaign for WEEE recycling

A national campaign to increase consumers awareness on the need to recycle Waste Electronic & Electrical equipment has been launched.

Research has shown that consumer understanding of the need to recycle is limited, so the removal of the take-back service opt-out should do much to increase collections via retailers.