ICL spearheads UK recycling standard

ICL has launched a scheme for vetting and auditing approved recycling firms, which it hopes will become the basis for UK standards on IT recycling and re-usage.

The scheme, called Recycle, includes a vetting procedure of up to a year, followed by monitoring of how much equipment is recycled and how, plus environmental controls such as air quality and dust emissions.

The scheme is a bid to pre-empt stringent European legislation on the disposal of old IT equipment.

Joy Boyce, ICL head of corporate environmental affairs, said: 'We have a complete audit trail for all the equipment we send. We want to know whether recyclers are getting a good return and like a low percentage to go to landfill.'

An EU directive on electronics recycling, mandating safe recycling of discarded IT equipment is due to be published soon. It is expected to demand that 80 to 90 per cent of kit is recycled and may make suppliers, resellers and business owners jointly liable for this.

Legislation in member states will follow in about two years.

The Industry Council for Electronic Recycling estimated that of nearly 125,000 tonnes of IT hardware discarded in 1996, 76 per cent was dumped in landfill and only 24 per cent was collected. Of the latter, 96 per cent was recycled or re-used.

ICL estimated that roughly a third of its redundant IT kit can be refurbished, another third stripped for re-usable parts and the remainder scrapped and mostly recycled.

Recycle will be an open standard which anyone can adopt and ICL will apply it to all the equipment it handles, rather than just ICL-badged hardware.