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What does WEEE mean to IT?
Recycling directive shrouded in uncertainty...

By Sylvia Carr

Published: Thursday 17 February 2005

With the 13 August deadline for the WEEE Directive fast approaching, there appear to be more questions than answers about its impact on the IT industry.

Going by the full name of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, the legislation aims to force businesses and consumers to dispose of electronic equipment in a responsible fashion - namely through increased recycling and reuse.

With the directive not yet finalised, one question still to be answered is who will pay for each step of the recycling or refurbishment process. The directive indicates ultimate responsibility for the cost of recycling equipment will lie with the vendors and manufacturers. But it's unclear exactly what role suppliers might play.

Speaking at a roundtable discussion today in London, Gerry Hacket, MD of RDC, an IT equipment disposal service provider owned by UK reseller Computacenter, said: "For the supply chain downstream of the vendor, the distributors and resellers, what responsibility will they have?"

Suppliers may pay the cost of collection while manufacturer pay for recycling. Yet this could get complicated for suppliers collecting kit made by a wide range of vendors.

Large companies are all too happy to let the vendors and suppliers work it out, according to the roundtable participants, and even see it as an opportunity to offload the cost of removing used computer equipment onto the suppliers and vendors they buy from.

Gary Owen, head of enterprise products at Fujitsu Siemens Computers, said in the short term "businesses will leverage this for all its worth, making [recycling] part of infrastructure refresh deals".

So, when a user organisation buys new equipment, the same vendor who delivers it will take away the old equipment too.

Simon Read, a lawyer from Baker and McKenzie, said: "The intent [in WEEE] is for business users to deal with [recycling] contractually."

Questions loom for how WEEE will affect smaller businesses, though, which don't place big orders with vendors and thus have little leverage to negotiate favourable contracts. Many have not even heard of the directive or understand what it means to them. Fujitsu Siemens' Owen said: "With small businesses there's astounding amount of ignorance about WEEE."

Geraint Day, head of environment policy at the Institute of Directors, whose membership is over 80 per cent small or mid-sized businesses, said SMEs are concerned about the cost of WEEE and confused about where to go for answers.

Day stressed "there's still a lot of learning and information dissemination needed within government" to create a coherent message which can be communicated to businesses.

Another key question is how to get businesses to comply with WEEE. RDC's Hacket said the money they can get back from refurbishing and reselling used equipment could be an incentive.

According to Hacket, 60 per cent of equipment brought to his company by corporate customers can generate funds through reselling, while about 10 per cent can be reused by the customer after refurbishment and 30 per cent can be recycled.

Appealing to a company's self-interest is a good tactic with WEEE or any environmental policies, according to Owen, because "companies don't have a 'green' agenda to save the planet. They have it because it will improve market position, bottom line or otherwise help them in business."

The WEEE Directive could bring on more charitable donations as well as reuse of hardware within an organisation, especially at the server level, where a powerful system could be retired to a less resource-intensive job such as in a grid or clustered environment.

Reusing computers, however, brings up security issues as employees' personal data could be left on the hard drive.

One thing that does seem clear is that vendors' recycling costs will be passed onto consumers in some form. Fujitsu-Siemens' Owen said: "Computer manufacturers will look to amortise recycling costs across the business which will increase prices or slow price decreases."

At some point recycling costs may lengthen PC replacement cycles, according to Owen. The thinking goes that PC makers would not be keen to encourage short replacement cycles if the extra sales didn't make up for recycling fees.

A final question for law makers is enforcement. Consumers, it appears, may dispose of equipment with retailers or directly to a clearinghouse which would be responsible for dealing with all hardware. Vendors would then be charged for these services based on their market share for the area the clearinghouse is located - and those who did not pay would be open to legal action.

For business equipment, vendors and manufacturers may well band together to create such a clearinghouse as well. But that, like so many issues surrounding WEEE, is yet to be decided.