Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment

Every company has it, a forgotten room or stuffy server room where broken screens, computers and printers collect dust. Electronic waste is complicated. With a long name like 'Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment' and a sexy abbreviation like WEEE, it is now also not a literary one that the average employee wants to delve into voluntarily during their lunch break. Did you have to read the previous sentence twice? Point made, then. And actually, that's a shame. Because these devices contain so many important materials that could get a better second home than the oblivion of an abandoned server room. This is how to easily dispose of your WEEE waste.

WEEE includes all electrical and electronic equipment that a household or business may discard. Think broken laptops, old computer screens, faltering printers... In short, anything that uses electric current or electromagnetic fields.

This is the international term for AEEA in dutch or DEEE in French. The guidelines and criteria are just the same.

A lot of items that you wouldn't immediately think of also fall under the WEEE category, such as ATMs, dental chairs, servers and snack machines. By the way, these are typical examples of professional WEEE waste.

Yes, even though it is not so much harmful to us, it is hugely polluting to our natural environment. Take your coffee shop's old fridge, for example. There are a lot of parts containing mercury, oils and other coolants in there that you can't just landfill. This is why WEEE falls under hazardous waste and must be treated mandatorily by an authorised partner.

On 4 July 2012, the European Parliament decided once and for all what exactly we should do with our discarded appliances. The result was the WEEE directive which stated:

• WEEE must be collected separately from other types of waste
• WEEE must be treated and recycled in an environmentally friendly way
• producers of electrical and electronic equipment are responsible for financing the collection, treatment and recycling of their products
• Member States must set collection targets for WEEE
• WEEE should not be exported to non-OECD countries for disposal or treatment

Stay away from the landfill because there are much easier ways to get your old electronics out of that dusty server room. It's best to contact a waste management company. At Out Of Use, for example, we come and collect your old WEEE waste for free and then recycle these devices....

Out Of Use is an authorised partner of Recupel for the B2B market, both as a charter collector and processor of WEEE. Since March 2018, Out Of Use also holds the WEEELABEX certificate (Waste of Electric and Electronic Equipment Label of Excellence). Best of all, at Out Of Use, we love sustainable business. Donating your old appliances to schools or supporting Natuurpunt with them? We make it possible.