WRAP launches electrical sustainability action plan

The Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has launched the new Electrical and Electronic Equipment Sustainability Action Plan (esap), which aims to ‘improve business efficiency and the sustainability of electrical and electronic products throughout their lifecycle’.

First announced last year, the plan has been launched to bring together stakeholders in the electrical and electronic equipment sector (such as designers, manufacturers, retailers, recyclers and reuse organisations) and act as collaborative framework for ‘sharing evidence and implementing sector-wide actions’ to improve product and business efficiency.

It has been launched following on from WRAP’s December 2013 report ‘Switched on to Value’, which found that around a quarter of all waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) discarded by householders at recycling centres was suitable for reuse, and that if these products were reused (and the lifetimes of shorter-life products were extended), the UK could have saved up to 170,000 tonnes of resources, delivering a carbon benefit of around 1.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year.

Further, WRAP found that the UK market value for trading pre-owned equipment could be worth up to £3 billion, and that as 55 per cent of people would buy secondhand technology products, there are ‘significant opportunities for businesses and consumers through trading-in used electronic equipment and designing longer life appliances’.

esap action themes

As such, the plan will seek to boost efficiencies in a range of products, but especially televisions, laptop computers, vacuum cleaners, refrigeration products and washing machines, which WRAP has identified as having the greatest resource impacts on the UK market.

Following feedback from stakeholders, esap will begin its work by focusing on five areas:

1. Extending product durability through design and customer information

This will be achieved by providing product design specifications and buying guidelines to address common failures and extend durability, as well as developing consumer information on product durability;

2. Minimising product returns

Stakeholders will work to collate data on the costs and causes of product returns to enable better buyer and user guidance and reduce ‘no fault found’ returns (estimated cost to UK businesses £400 million a year in product value alone);

3. Understanding and influencing consumer behaviour on product durability and reparability

esap members will work to understand user behaviour and impact on product returns to develop information on product repair, re-sale, durability and recycling, thus reducing in-warranty returns and potentially developing new income streams through repair services;

4. Implementing ‘profitable, resilient and resource-efficient’ business models

esap will develop and test a toolkit for more resource-efficient business models by tracking and reporting the residual value of used products to demonstrate market opportunity for re-sale; and

5. Gaining greater value from reuse and recycling

By analysing product age data from reuse and recycling collection points, stakeholders will seek to increase understanding of user behaviour and actual product age at time of disposal in a bid to increase WEEE collection rates and value recovery.

Writing in her blog on WRAP’s website, CEO Dr Liz Goodwin said: ‘Our work on wasted electrical resources moved one step further with our latest announcement on the prettily named esap – Electricals Sustainable Action Plan. This is bringing the sector together to provide a framework for collaborative action. We have a great opportunity to improve the business efficiency and sustainability of electrical and electronic products throughout their lifecycle.’

Find out more about esap.