The European Commission has adopted a new Circular Economy Action Plan – one of the main blocks of the European Green Deal, Europe’s new agenda for sustainable growth. The new Action Plan announces initiatives along the entire life cycle of products, targeting for example their design, promoting circular economy processes, fostering sustainable consumption, and aiming to ensure that the resources used are kept in the EU economy for as long as possible.
Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) or e-waste is electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) that becomes waste. High-added-value products usually require special materials, and without them, production is not possible (e.g.: indium in LCDs). Nowadays some important raw materials mainly come from non-European countries, for example, Rare Earth Elements (REE) from China. The amount of electrical and electronic equipment put on the market in the EU evolved from 7.6 million tonnes in 2012 to a peak of 12.4 million tonnes in 2020 (over the period 2012- 2020). The total collected WEEE increased from 3.0 to 4.7 million tonnes in the same period (EUROSTAT). The amount of WEEE is generally increasing because of the intensification of technological developments, increasing population, rapid societal and economic development (developing countries access to modern technologies), and changes in consumer habits (mobile phones, decreasing product lifetimes). On the one hand, untreated WEEE is hazardous to the environment and human health; on the other hand, WEEE is a resource which should be used. WEEE processing faces many challenges, e.g. extremely small concentrations of valuable elements, composite materials, thin layers, covering materials, rapid changes in EEE technologies, the substitution of elements, and market price variation of elements. Collection, material recycling and energetically utilisation of municipal solid waste is also a considerable task nowadays. Our research group focuses on the following material flows, and waste flows:
Contribution to SDG 9: Industry, innovation, and infrastructure and SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production