Electronic waste, increasing collection channels

Electronic waste, increasing collection channels to push numbers up in Italy, where the national rate in 2024 stopped at 29.6% (it was 30.2% in 2023, 34% in 2022), still a long way from the 65% target required by the European directive 2012/19 transposed by dl 49/2014. In 2024, the input for consumption grew more than the collection, whose share consequently decreased, confirming a decline that has been seen since 2019. Yet Italian plants treated a total of 540,854 tonnes of WEEE in 2024, an increase of 5.9%: a result driven by professional waste, which marked an annual increase of 18.4% (170,269 tonnes) after the drop in 2023, while household waste - although up on the previous year - recorded +1% at 370,585 tonnes.

And if e-waste collection does not take off, not even the next phase, the extraction of critical raw materials, will be able to develop in our country in an economically sustainable way. In 2024, Italy recorded the highest dependence on imports of materials, including critical materials, among the main EU countries: 46.6%, compared to 30.8% in France, 39.5% in Germany and 39.8% in Spain.

In order to reverse the trend, the Centro di Coordinamento Raee - a consortium owned by the 14 collective systems of manufacturers of household and professional electrical and electronic equipment responsible for disposal - is leading several initiatives. Managing Director Fabrizio Longoni explains: "We plan to increase the capillarity of collection and extend the locations where it takes place. We will propose to the Ministry of the Environment to extend the model created with the signing of the memorandum of understanding between Mase itself and Aeroporti di Roma in June, which allows e-waste to be brought to the company's airports, both by passengers and by employees of the companies on site: it will then be collected by our consortium members and put into the correct disposal circuit. Our proposal is to extend this scheme to other frequented places, so that citizens can find collection points then managed by us and the collective systems, even outside the activities of local waste management companies. Schools, for example, where there is a daily presence, could be involved.

The initiative is not the only one: "Starting this year, distributors who make one-for-one home collection (when you buy a new appliance you are entitled to take back the discarded one, ed.), for instance of an old washing machine, also have the possibility to collect other consumer electronics products or devices that the consumer wants to throw away. The distributor takes them to the collection point and then they follow the normal disposal route," explains Longoni, who also lists other actions of the WEEE Coordination Centre: "We have started with a pilot project together with a plant that handles plastic packaging and is able to separate from the incoming stream the WEEE, which is often one with its plastic shell, difficult to separate and often the object of error on the part of users: we will collect them. And if it works we want to extend it".

These new projects are in addition to others that are already up and running: "We started a few years ago to sign agreements with large users of electrical appliances similar to household appliances, such as lighting products or computers and monitors, to organise the disposal service with them directly: they become temporary deposits of their own waste, which then enters the correct path. We have an agreement with the CNR and all public research bodies, for example. It is a model that is working and that we intend to expand," says Longoni, who also recalls the programme agreement with municipalities, thanks to which the consortium collects the WEEE of local authorities such as schools and public offices, and the recent equating of installers and technical assistance centres with distributors, who are therefore able to collect WEEE.