As products’ lifecycles become ever shorter, the pile of waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE) devices becomes ever larger. In France alone, 1.7 million tonnes of the stuff arise each year (up from 1.3 million three years ago). And, like the rest of Europe, the country is subject to the requirements of the WEEE Directive.

As part of the solution, the company Envie 2e nord (which stands for ‘Entreprise Nouvelle Vers l’Insertion Economique – Environnement et Emploi’, or ‘New Enterprises Towards Economic Integration – Envrionment and Employment’ for those of you who haven’t brushed up on your French lately) offers a service of collection, repair and reprocessing of WEEE for the area north of Paris. The company’s work is therefore threefold: firstly, its fleet of 15 lorries collects the WEEE from distributors of household appliances and businesses, as well as community groups and associations. It then processes and separates the materials that make up different appliances, selling them on to external companies for recycling. And finally, it repairs and resells appliances in its chain of Envie shops.

The 14,000-square metre warehouse in Lesquin is capable of processing 100 tonnes of WEEE every day, with the total amount of WEEE dealt with per year totalling 15,000 tonnes. Of the WEEE it receives – which includes 200,000 televisions, 150,000 small domestic appliances and 100,000 washing machines yearly – 85 per cent of the material is recycled, exceeding the targets for every category of WEEE in the WEEE Directive.

When the WEEE arrives at the warehouse, items are dismantled and separated into groups of composite parts. Reusable components are moved to the in-house workshop, where they will be used to build new appliances, and recyclable materials are moved to the relevant area of the warehouse for processing. There are four lines for different types of WEEE: ‘screens’ (for TVs and monitors), ‘cold home appliances’ (refrigerators and freezers), ‘non-cold home appliances’ (washing machines, dishwashers and cooking equipment) and ‘small appliances’.

Any dangerous parts, such as batteries, are separated for collection by an external company for more specialist recycling. Amongst the most common recyclables separated out along the lines are steel, aluminium, copper and plastic. These are processed on-site for sale to industrial companies, which recycle them to make secondary raw materials. Another common material, polyurethane foam, is sold to cement plants to be used as fuel for their kilns.

There are many complex machines in the warehouse, each designed to manage a specific type of WEEE. The largest of them, a giant shredder, is dedicated solely to the processing of fridges and freezers. This machine is part of the company’s ‘cold line’, which is capable of recycling around 350,000 appliances every year. Before shredding, the appliance’s compressor is removed, as it is too hard and risks damaging the machine’s teeth. Harmful materials such as CFCs, pentane, barium, lead and the rare earth elements present in cathode ray tubes are also isolated before shredding and processed to avoid polluting the atmosphere or the earth. Once this is done, the entire appliance is fed into the machine, re-emerging on the other side as tiny, centimetre-squared fragments of steel, plastics and foams. The fragments are sorted and stored in large bins, where they await collection from external recycling companies.
Glass screens from televisions also have their own, specialist machine. The process involved in the “highly innovative” system for recycling glass is confidential, and the only thing the company’s representative would tell us is that the glass is reduced to sand, certain minerals are separated out, and then the remainder is used to make machines. When pressed, the spokesperson was unwlling to explain what kind of machines would be made using sand (nor why this method would be preferable to recycling glass back into glass!).

Reusable parts, on the other hand, go (in a transparent process) to the workshop, where they are used to create new machines. Envie 2e sells 60,000 appliances every year in its Envie shops, of which there are 50 across France. The parts of nearly five different appliances are needed to create each of the refurbished items, which are sold at a 50 per cent discount compared to new models and guaranteed for one year.

And though Envie 2e is dedicated to WEEE, its environmental endeavours do not end with the waste electrical devices. All the vehicles used in the warehouse are powered by electricity, and aspirating machines are used to suck dust out of the air, meaning that the 120 employees working in the factory at any one time do not need to wear masks – only safety glasses and gloves. The site also contains a bicycle repair shop. So, they say oui to WEEE and to so much more (sorry).