When speaking with our new customers, one of the most frequent questions asked is; "What happens to our WEEE?". They like to understand what happens to their waste equipment and we like to educate them on how we recycle their WEEE. As an Approved Authorised Treatment Facility (AATF) we apply the waste hierarchy and best available treatment recovery and recycling techniques, but what does that mean?
The average collection of ours include a varied collection of electrical equipment found in the average office. Usually there will be pc’s, monitors, cables, printers, desktop fans and even white goods such as a broken fridge. We load each collection into weee storage crates as pictured to the right. This allows us to safely transport the equipment back to our recycling facility and we process each load using the following steps.
The first step is to asset each load in order to provide a recycling report back to the customer once processed. This can either be numbers of each type and weights or a full detailed asset report including serial numbers. Then the equipment will then be graded and sorted into their types and segregated for processing. We remove all hard drives and any data holding devices and destroy these first. This is of up most importance and is recorded for the data destruction certificate. At this point we can provide the recycling report and destruction certificate for the customer.
Having asseted and destroyed any data, the equipment can now be processed along with other loads depending on their type. For example all of the older/broken pc’s will be segregated together, this allows us to bulk process them by hand. We strip the machines in order to separate out the components and allow for the materials contained within to be recovered and recycled into new products. We hand strip pc’s, servers, switches and similar items.
The majority of other equipment including old printers, keyboards, fans and small domestic appliances have their materials recovered by machinery. Imagine a large food processor breaking the equipment into pieces and then separating out all of the materials. This is a simple explanation of a detailed piece of large recycling machinery but the end result is a very clean stream of recyclable plastics, metals, cables etc. This state of the art equipment ensures our customers benefit from very high recycling rates for their equipment.
Computer monitors are processed separately due to their hazardous components. The outer shells are removed and then the screens removed by machinery to recover the lead content. Then the hazardous tube is removed and processed with the remaining shell then recycled to recover the materials.
We hope this better explains how we process our customers WEEE back at our AATF. It is a detailed process that we have tried to simplify as best as possible. We hope to provide animations explaining this process in detail shortly. In the meantime, if you wish to find out more or have any questions on our WEEE recycling please feel free to call us on 01234 315496. We also detail how we process fridges that we collect on our Fridge Freezer Recycling page.