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34 34 P P a r t I : a r t I : T r e n d s a n d R e a s o n s t o G o G r e e nr e n d s a n d R e a s o n s t o G o G r e e n

The Byteback program is a fusion of government and industry, aimed toward managing
e-waste. The program—serving Australia’s southeastern state of Victoria—involves partners
Sustainability Victoria (a government environmental group) in conjunction with the
Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and founding partners Apple, Canon,
Dell, Epson, Fujitsu, Fuji-Xerox, HP, IBM, Lenovo, and Lexmark.
With the Byteback program, consumers can bring up to 10 computers to be recycled at
no charge to them. Once the devices are accepted by Byteback, printed circuit boards are
sent to Canada; nickel and lithium batteries are sent to France; cathode ray tubes are sent to
the Netherlands; and LCD screens are sent to the U.S. for processing.
Although this seems to be more transporting of e-waste (and it is), if the Australian
government decides to adopt a similar program throughout the entire country, it will have
the economy of scale necessary to process materials in-country.
The Byteback program is only a trial. It started in 2005 and will run until the end of
2008. It is expected that what the Victorians learn from the program can be used to prepare
the entire country to properly dispose of computer equipment.

NOTE In its initial phase, Byteback prevented 300 tons of electronic and electrical waste from
entering Australian landfills.

Europe
The European Union leads the world with its e-waste management WEEE and its RoHs
directives. These laws manage not only the resultant recycling and handling of e-waste, but
also its creation. In this section, we’ll talk about these two directives and how individual
European nations are reacting.

WEEE Directive
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (also known as the WEEE
Directive) is the European Union directive on WEEE and became law in February 2003. The
directive sets collection, recycling, and recovery goals for used electronic equipment.

NOTE The WEEE Directive has become a popular model for managing e-waste. As you already
read, several Canadian provinces have modeled their own legislation on Europe’s WEEE Directive.

The directive places the responsibility for the disposal of WEEE on the manufacturers.
Manufacturers are required to establish a program for collecting WEEE. The directive states,
“Users of electrical and electronic equipment from private households should have the
possibility of returning WEEE at least free of charge.”