Environmental treatment of electronics

Environmental treatment of waste electronics

The figure shows the geographical location of environmental treatment of collected waste electronics. There are various treatment operations, from pre-sorting to crushing and shredding into a number of coarse fractions, such as plastics and metal, to melting of various metals, and extraction of rare earth elements, etc.

Where it is stated that the treatment takes place in Denmark this generally means that the first part of the treatment is done in a Danish facility; typically, this will be pre-sorting, manual dismantling, and similar. In some cases, there will subsequently be shredding in a shredder facility, which results in a number of fractions that are then sold to other EU countries for further processing and melting into new or so-called secondary raw materials. See definitions of environmental treatment under next table.

Environmental treatment and environmental targets

A number of statutory requirements and objectives must be met for the treatment of waste equipment. After waste collection and delivery to a reprocessing facility a distinction is made between the following forms of treatment:

• Preparing for re-use: Introduced with a legislative amendment in 2014.  A definition of treatment criteria is still pending, and is not fully representative in connection with the reporting of data for recent years’ statistics.
• Recycling: The equipment/the products are subjected to a process to permit recycling of materials or substances.
• Recovery: Recycling + incineration = recovery. The equipment/the products are treated in a way to permit recycling of materials or substances AND some of the equipment is incinerated in an energy recovery facility. (Recovery is only relevant for WEEE, since incineration is not an approved form of treatment for batteries).
• Residues: Residues after recycling and incineration disposed of onto land, in a water body or into the air in the form of emissions, evaporation etc. Solid materials from the residual fraction will normally be landfilled at approved landfill facilities.

Reporting of treated quantities is done per category and treatment facility as follows  (Note! information about the choice of treatment plant of the different producers is confidential and can therefore only be accessed by DPA and environmental authorities):

• Name and address of facility
• Number of kilograms per category delivered to the facility
• Number of kilograms per category recycled at the facility (BAT + WEEE)
• Number of kilograms per category recovered at the facility (only for WEEE)
• Calculated rates of recycling and recovery

The calculated rate of efficiency for recycling (WEEE and BAT) and recovery (only for WEEE) is used to monitor compliance with the statutory requirements. See below table:

Definitions can be found under INFO above

Collected quantities of WEEE compared with WEEE sent to treatment

Statutory targets have been set up for both collected and treated volumes. See menu item on EU targets.

Treated volumes appearing from the statistics are not necessarily identical with the volumes collected in the same period. Some collected volumes from one calendar year may not be treated until the subsequent calendar year. Correspondingly, WEEE, batteries, or vehicles collected in one calendar year may have been placed in a temporary storage and sent for treatment in the subsequent year.

Light sources are subjected to the specific source of error that collected volumes will often be registered with too large a weight, since this fraction contains other wastes not covered by producer responsibility. This primarily concerns plastic and cardboard packaging, e.g. for fluorescent lamps. Often the package will be wet since enclosed collection equipment with no drainage possibility and which is located outdoors is used. This means that these incorrect fractions often make up a considerable weight compared with the weight of the light source. When the weight of treated volumes is computed it will be stated only for the light sources without the above incorrect fractions and liquids, which were part of the collected volumes. This means that there will be a ”systematic” deviation between collected and treated volumes. The compliance scheme of Lyskildebranchens WEEE Forening (LWF) has estimated that the incorrect fractions and liquids together make up around 5% of the weight of the collected volumes.

NOTE! Information about the choice of treatment plant of the different producers is confidential and can therefore only be accessed by DPA and environmental authorities.

Read more about calculation methods for Environmental treatment