Frequently Asked Questions

What is WEEE?

WEEE stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. The WEEE directive was introduced in July 2007.

The directive encourages businesses and consumers to correctly dispose of and recycle their old electrical items so they can be put to good use and new equipment can be made from the old reusable material. This includes IT and telecommunications equipment and household equipments such as fridges, ovens and microwaves.

WEEE is one of the fastest growing waste streams in the UK; approximately 2 million tones of electrical waste are generated every year.

For further information please visit www.environment-agency.gov.uk/weee

Who is responsible for WEEE waste?

As the original ‘source’ of the goods that eventually become electrical waste, manufacturers and producers of electrical products have the greatest responsibility under the WEEE Directive. They now fully responsible for what happens to the goods they sell into the market (since 31st August 2005) at the end of their lives.

Retailers of electrical products also have a responsibility to recycle electrical waste they sell in the UK. Retailers either offer in store ‘take back’ schemes which allow people to take their electrical waste back to the store or join a distributor ‘take back’ scheme. Use of these schemes is valid for household users of electrical goods.

Businesses who wish to dispose of their electrical waste cannot take it back to the retailer they bought it from. They need to approach a registered waste carrier to safely dispose of their waste in a compliant and safe manner.

What is hazardous electrical waste?

The hazardous waste products covered by the WEEE directive include: computer monitors, televisions, plasma screens, refrigerator units (including freezers).

If any organisation produces more than 500Kg of hazardous waste they need to register as a Hazardous Waste Producer with the Environment Agency.

Dynamic Asset Recovery can register your premises now; For an annual fee of £18.00 payable to the Environment Agency plus a £10.00 admin fee we will take care of the registration process for you.

Any legitimate waste carrier cannot remove Hazardous waste from your premises without your site code.

Why can’t I just throw my electrical waste in a skip / bin?

Under the WEEE Regulations, all new electrical goods should now be marked with the crossed-out wheeled bin symbol shown above.

Every electrical item we use has used natural resources to produce it. Many of these resources are irreplaceable and by throwing the items into landfill, we are throwing away the opportunity to reuse the materials in future.

Landfill sites containing electronic equipment waste are contributing to our CO2 emissions and could leak harmful chemicals into the surrounding soil and groundwater. If products are incinerated the air becomes polluted as well.

The WEEE directive encourages us all to act sustainably and provides a set of guidelines to help us put systems and procedures in place to encourage the reuse of as many materials as possible.

What happens to the equipment you collect from us?

All equipment we collect from you will be inspected, tested and graded.

Any working components will be savaged, these will then be remarketed individually or used to repair another piece of equipment ready for remarketing.

Any items that are too old or beyond repair will be demanufactured and all materials will be recycled or disposed of in an environmentally compliant way.

All equipment is traceable throughout the process

Is our data secure?

100% yes! We understand the importance of our client’s confidentiality. We used the latest software that exceeds the DoD 5220.22M standard.

All data on drives formatted by us is destroyed beyond recovery using advanced wiping techniques that stop both software and hardware tools from recovering any data.

What is DoD 5200.22M standard?

It provides baseline standards for the protection of how sensitive data should be handled. On writable media such as hard drives the DoD standard recommends the approach of “overwriting all addressable locations with a character, then a random character and verify”

The DoD standard requires all addressable space on a disk to be overwritten 3 times. The software which we used to carry out this process overwrites all addressable locations on your disks up to 7 times.

Can’t see an answer to your question?

Contact us via telephone or email and will we be happy to answer any question you may have.