Expanded product responsibility for electrical and electronic scrap as well
The German Electrical and Electronic Appliance Act, which came into force on 23 March 2005, serves to implement two EU directives in terms of national legislation. Its objectives are to avoid waste from electrical and electronic appliances, to reduce the quantity of waste by recycling, by laying down collection, recovery and recycling quotas, and to downsize the content of pollutants in the appliances themselves.
Under the new law, since 24 March 2006 consumers will be able to hand in their old radios, computers and other electrical and electronic appliances free of charge at the municipal collection points. The manufacturers concerned are obligated to take back the appliances collected, to dispose of them safely in accordance with the current state of the art, and to recover 80 per cent of them by weight to ecological standards. Since July 2006, moreover, certain heavy metals, like lead or cadmium, and brominated flame-proofing agents may no longer be used in new appliances.
Since 24 November 2005, all manufacturers must have themselves registered before they put electrical appliances on the market. The registration agency involved is the Used Electrical Appliances Register Foundation (EAR) set up by the business community at Fürth in August 2004, and endowed with statutory prerogatives, under the supervision of the Federal Environmental Agency, which will also be coordinating the municipalities' initial complement of collection containers, and arranging for the manufacturers to fetch from the municipalities the appliances thus collected.
All appliances must be permanently labelled, so that the manufacturer concerned can be unambiguously identified. There is also a mandatory requirement for the symbol denoting separate collection of electrical and electronic appliances.
As a can-do environmental service provider, Duales System Deutschland GmbH has since 2005 also been offering its own solution: the DSD's all-inclusive package ranges from advice on logistics-and recovery to documentation on the quantities recovered.
