Asked by: Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate his Department has made of the volume of consumer electronics that end up in landfill.
Answered by Thérèse Coffey
The Government has not made an estimate of the volume of consumer electronics that end up in landfill. The 2013 Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Regulations seek to reduce the amount of WEEE going to landfill by encouraging its separate collection and subsequent treatment, reuse, recovery, recycling and environmentally sound disposal.
Reports on the amount of WEEE (both household and non-household) collected in the UK under the WEEE Regulations is published by the Environment Agency here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/waste-electrical-and-electronic-equipment-weee-in-the-uk.
Last year, producers financed the collection of 493,323 tonnes of household WEEE.
Additionally, based on a study carried out by the Waste and Resources Action Programme, we estimate that between 250k and 273k tonnes of large domestic appliances (cookers, washing machines etc.) are collected with scrap metal and recycled outside the WEEE system every year.