□ our trainee reporter Wang Wei our reporter Su Ning recently, the European Parliament passed a bill on product maintenance rights to improve the durability and maintainability of electrical appliances. The European Parliament said that the right to repair products is an important part of the EU’s new circular economy action plan. The introduction of the new bill not only hopes that the products can be more durable and safer in design, but also hopes that the product parts can be easier to disassemble and repair, so as to facilitate consumers to make sustainable use choices.
Improve the durability of electrical appliances
E-waste is an informal term for the so-called “waste electrical and electronic equipment” (WEEE). It refers to the discarded electrical or electronic equipment that is no longer used, mainly including the obsolete products of household appliances such as refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines, televisions and communication electronic products such as computers. E-waste may contain metals such as gold, copper and nickel, which can be recycled, but at the same time, raw materials such as mobile phones also contain arsenic, cadmium, lead and other persistent and bioaccumulative toxic substances, threatening the surrounding environment. According to the analysis of EU authorities, in order to completely solve this problem, the EU should strive to make electrical appliances “repairable” and “easy to repair”. Effective maintenance right should fully consider the product life cycle, and the product design and production process should be standardized. At present, as part of product labels, the European Parliament requires manufacturers to provide QR codes and digital product passports, indicating product composition information, so as to improve the chances of products being reused and recycled. When selling goods, businesses should inform consumers of product maintainability, expected service life, difficulty in obtaining spare parts, maintenance services and other information. For non-conforming products, the European Parliament called for the establishment of a joint and several liability mechanism between manufacturers and sellers. The EU also plans to ban the use of glue bonded batteries in electronic products from next year to facilitate consumers’ replacement. At the same time, it requires that the system update of smart phones will not reduce the overall running speed of mobile phones, and the update is reversible. In order to meet the health and environmental challenges, the EU issued the directive on waste electrical and electronic equipment and the directive on banning the use of certain hazardous substances in electronic and electrical equipment in 2003, which restricts the use of several toxic materials in the manufacture of circuits and electronic products, and stipulates five priorities for the management and disposal of electronic waste: reduction, reuse, reuse, other utilization methods and disposal. In February last year, the European Parliament passed a resolution on the new action plan for circular economy, calling for more measures to be taken. By 2025, the urban waste recovery rate will reach 55%, 60% in 2030 and 65% in 2035, while the urban waste landfill rate will not exceed 10% by 2035
The amount of garbage is growing fast
In recent years, e-waste in Europe has grown rapidly. According to the latest data released by WEEE forum headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, the total amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment in the world in 2021 is estimated to be 57.4 million tons. It is estimated that the total amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment in the world will reach 74.7 million tons in 2030. And this number continues to increase. The new cycle vision of electronic products released by the world economic forum in 2019 pointed out that less than 20% of the world’s electronic equipment will be recycled. If no measures are taken, the amount of waste will more than double to 120 million tons per year by 2050. Rapid technological innovation and high consumption level make e-waste the fastest growing household waste. Almost all consumer electronics enterprises launch new products every year, especially mobile phones. Pushing new products twice a year has almost become the mainstream of major companies, and the elimination rate will naturally rise. The short life of products and equipment that are difficult to repair also exacerbate the waste. A survey conducted by the EU in April showed that when there are problems with household appliances, 77% of EU consumers’ first choice is to solve the problems through maintenance, and 79% of EU consumers believe that manufacturers should be required to improve the maintainability of products or replace specific parts. Many European people said that they were willing to repair if the maintenance cost was two or three percent lower than the purchase price. However, due to the high cost of maintenance, many people have to give up maintenance and buy new products directly. There are many reasons for the high maintenance cost. A maintenance worker said that the price of parts required for maintenance is very high. Nowadays, many electrical designs are too integrated, and many components are concentrated on one motherboard. No matter how small the problem is, the whole motherboard needs to be replaced. Some products are composed of several parts, which are difficult to disassemble. Large electrical appliances need door-to-door maintenance, and the time cost is very high. It takes a lot of transportation expenses to run three or four stores a day at most. Maintenance workers complained: “electrical appliances are very difficult to repair. Some products just take a long time to open the shell. More and more customers have to choose to buy new products.”
Need consumer participation
E-waste needs careful treatment. It is understood that more than 95% of the materials in e-waste can be reused, and e-waste may also contain “strategic metals” with scarce reserves such as indium and palladium, but indispensable in national defense construction, aerospace and other fields. However, because e-waste contains heavy metals such as mercury, improper treatment will pollute groundwater and threaten the health of residents.
Where are the e-waste that has not entered the formal recycling channels? The survey shows that some are left idle in a corner of the home for a long time, while others are either directly thrown into the trash can or sold to waste buyers. When electronic waste reaches the hands of small vendors, it is put in the wrong place.
When small vendors buy electronic waste, they usually sell it to dismantling workshops. In order to reduce costs, the latter will not buy high-end equipment, but use the simplest method to extract high-value materials from electronic waste. For example, the melting point of precious metals is higher than that of plastics, lead, mercury and other metals, and gold and silver are refined by incineration. In order to separate and purify, the disassembly workshop will also use strong acid, strong alkali and other chemical solutions. After obtaining the required precious metals, they will bury or burn the waste containing a large amount of harmful substances as ordinary garbage, which will cause very serious pollution to the natural environment such as soil, surface water and groundwater.
Obviously, e-waste placed in the wrong place can not realize their value, but will cause damage and harm. To put e-waste in the right place and make it a real treasure, we must start from the whole life cycle