Home : Networking : News

WEEE directive may hurt IT budgets

Analysis: When it comes to the WEEE directive, what may be good for the environment is not so good for manufacturers' pockets and may ultimately result in increased costs for users.

By Maggie Holland, 13 Jul 2007 at 16:39

gallery

Worryingly, companies don't appear to be taking notice of warnings like this if recent research is anything to go by. Last week, Lenovo-commissioned research was published suggesting that almost a third of business PCs are dumped still containing sensitive data because many wrongly believe that formatting hard disks is sufficient to clear the decks.

Perhaps the PC industry could learn from its mobile counterparts, who woke up to the benefits of recycling and reusing years ago.

"We can offer financial incentives for bring back schemes. We work with businesses of any size throughout the UK and also work with networks to make sure that old equipment is returned quickly," said Simon Walsh, managing director of mobile phone recycler Mopay.

"The way westernised society works is that everyone wants a new and shiny phone so there's always a trail of unwanted phones. People need to understand that just because they don't want to use [that phone] anymore that someone else can benefit from it in an emerging market. We will reuse phones and get them back in the marketplace. SIM cards are destroyed straight away and all handsets are factory reset."

The ultimate aim for those in the mobile phone reuse business, much like the aims of the WEEE directive, is to reduce the amount of waste heading for landfill.

"There are around 100 million redundant mobile phones in the UK and statistics suggest that 15 million are thrown away," added Walsh.

"You'll find that that figure goes down in the next couple of years to 10 or five and we'll hopefully then get to zero as everyone is recycling rather than throwing away. That's our aim: to get people recycling rather than putting their phones in draws gathering dust or throwing them away.

However, while Walsh would love to see what has been achieved in the mobile world replicated elsewhere as a result of the WEEE directive, he recognises that PCs are a lot bigger and heavier than handsets and therefore there are much higher cost implications involved in how quickly and easily new life can be breathed into them.