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Published on August 26, 2007

The Electrical and Electronics Institute has announced that Thailand will soon draw up its own directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) to minimise their impact on the environment. At long last, Thailand is shaking off its complacency and doing something about the looming threat to its environment posed by the accumulation of huge amounts of hi-tech waste.

The Kingdom's directive on WEEE, modelled on the European Union's, aims to increase reuse and recycling and reduce the amount of hi-tech waste going into landfills by requiring manufacturers to arrange for the financing, collection, treatment and recovery of waste electrical and electronic goods at the end of their useful life. Distributors of such electrical and electronic goods are also obliged to allow consumers to return the equipment they no longer use for recycling, reuse or disposal, free of charge.

As in the EU, the directive on WEEE will be introduced in Thailand alongside the related directive on Restrictions of the use of certain Hazardous Substances (RoHS) in electrical and electronic equipment. Government regulatory authorities are consulting with manufacturers of electrical appliances and electronic equipment before coming up with the WEEE and RoHS, scheduled for implementation sometime next year.

More recycling of hi-tech junk can only be a good thing for the environment. The fact that manufacturers will be responsible for taking back their products for recycling, reuse or disposal will give them incentive to design equipment in a more environmentally efficient way, such as using parts and components that can be easily taken apart for recycling and reuse, if not also easy disposal.

The proliferation of household electrical appliances and electronic equipment - including computers, television sets, DVD players, mobile phones and refrigerators - grew tremendously in recent years as the country's economic and social development accelerated and people's purchasing power rose markedly. Consumers regularly trade up and upgrade their electrical appliances and electronic equipment and dump anything that is no longer of use.

Until now, little thought was given to how or where to dispose of all of this hi-tech junk. In the meantime, mountains of electrical and electronic waste have accumulated and are now clogging up landfills. Such waste is usually very difficult to dispose of safely because compared with more common recyclable trash like paper, cans and bottles, hi-tech electronics constitute an exceptional complex form of waste. They typically contain dozens of densely packed substances that can be difficult to separate and recycle, and many are highly toxic. For example, cathode-ray tubes in computer monitors and television sets that people are now beginning to throw away after upgrading to liquid-crystal display monitors. The cathode-ray tubes contain lead, a neurotoxin, as do printed circuit boards. Mercury, another neurotoxin, is used to light flat-panel display screens. Several types of batteries and circuit boards contain cadmium, a recognised carcinogen. The old-style tubes also contain polyvinyl chloride, brominated flame retardants, copper, beryllium, barium, zinc, chromium, silver and nickel, which are costly to dispose of safely.

What is worrying is that Thailand has never had a recycling industry to speak of. The country has to make up for lost time and start to educate the public as well as manufacturers about the importance of introducing directives on WEEE and RoHS. Under the planned directives, manufacturers must contribute an amount of money, based on their output, towards setting up a fund for safe disposal of hi-tech garbage. Whether or how much of such an additional cost will be passed on to consumers is still to be decided.

Manufacturers and consumers have joint responsibility to protect the environment. Manufacturers, already under obligation to ensure environmentally sound production processes, will have to take on the additional responsibility of taking back their products for recycling, reuse and final disposal, while consumers should consume more responsibly and be willing to chip in by contributing a small fraction of the amounts they spend on new electrical appliances and electronic equipment towards the fund for disposal of hi-tech trash.