Prague, May 13 (CTK) – The amount of the discarded electronic devices people and companies give to the waste containers, not throwing them into dustbins or landfills, has been growing in the past years, according to the information provided by the Czech Environment Ministry.
In 2006, only 11 percent of the volume of the products which appeared on the market in the year was sorted, but the figure surged to over 52 percent by 2016.
In the Czech Republic, there are six collection systems for common electronic devices, two of which specialising on a narrow group of products.
The amount of the electronic waste that is sorted annually soared from 22,170 tonnes to 91,513 tonnes between 2006 and 2016.
This means a growth from 2.2 kilogrammes per capita to 8.7 kilogrammes annually.
The lion’s share of the sorted waste is made up by large domestic appliances such as refrigerators, freezers and washing machines.
Czechs had 46.600 tonnes of them collected in 2016.
A European directive defines the minimum amount of electronic waste a collection system must get back.
“For 2016, it was at least 45 percent, but it will be 65 percent by 2021. The total quantity of the collected electronic waste will have to keep increasing,” Ladislav Trylc, from the Environment Ministry, said.
It is natural that people mostly sort large domestic appliances, David Vandrovec, direct of the collection system Rema, said.
“They cannot be simply thrown into a dustbin,” he added.
Rema, which collected almost one-fifth of electronic waste in the Czech Republic, recorded an increased interest in the sorting in 2017. It collected over 15,000 tonnes of the waste, which was 5 percent more than in in 2016.
The law stipulates the duty to retrieve and recycle old products for the manufacturers and importers of electronic devices.
