Ecodom (Consorzio italiano recupero e riciclaggio elettrodomestici, Italian Consortium for the recovery and recycling of household appliances) saw the installation of the new president Maurizio Tursini, General Manager Refrigeration and OEM for the area Europe, Middle East and Africa of Whirlpool Group. The new Board of Directors works side by side with him, in his president role: Giulia Lasagna (vice president), Maurizio Bernardi, Flavio Borgna, Marco Nardi, Andrea Riggio and Carlo Traversari. We have focused with him the development prospects of the Consortium’s course in the current Italian and European scenario.
HA parts&components interviewed the new president to assess the achievements on the subject of recycle.
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On what heritage do you rely as Ecodom President?
In eight years, the Consortium was able to create an operating machine become a best practice on Italian and European scale, which in 2015 collected and managed over 78,000 tons of Weee, from which were recycled 47,000 tons of iron, about 1,700 tons of aluminium, more than 1,600 tons of copper and 8,000 tons of plastic. The level of the collection service at the ecologic isles is equal to 99.9 percent, out of a total of 34,000 collections approximately. To all that we must add the fact that Weee eco-contributions applied by Ecodom to its producers have always been and still are the lowest in the market, to full benefit not only of the members of the Consortium but especially of consumers. Over these years, Ecodom succeeded in standing out also for the constant and original contribution of ideas, reflection cues and improvement proposals offered to our stakeholders (institutional decision-makers, local bodies, urban cleaning companies, Eee distributors, environmental and consumer associations) through the promotion of studies, surveys and researches. I believe that one of the “secrets”, perhaps the most important, at the base of these results is the cohesion among member producers: since the establishment of the Consortium, founder companies, the most important players in the white good sector operating in Italy, have lavished time and energies in this adventure, aware of the environmental responsibility that the European directive first and the national legislation afterwards had entrusted to them. In particular, Ecodom has always been run by a very cohesive and committed Board of Directors, formed by competent and passionate managers. For this reason, the heritage that I, as new President, am going to collect is important but not heavy: I will have the pleasure of being member of a Board Of Directors who still has the same customary spirit and determination.
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What are the still existing limits and what the strong points in the recycling and recovery of Weee, in particular household appliances and “big white goods”?
Against a management system on a European scale that represents the first positive example of application of the Extended Producer Responsibility, in Italy there are still two weak points. The first is the collection. In 2015,local bodies and distributors entrusted collective systems with about 250,000 tons of wastes, resulting in a per capita datum slightly exceeding 4 kg/inhabitant, much under the European average (7 kg/inhabitant), but especially distant from the targets fixed by the Community Directive (about 8 kg/inhabitant within this year; about 12 kg/inhabitant within 2019). The research carried out in 2012 by the United Nations University on behalf of Ecodom, with Ipsos and Milan Polytechnics, has estimated in more than 13 kg the quantity of Weee that each Italian citizen disposes each year: therefore, there are 9-10 kg per each inhabitant of which we lose track. An impressive quantity amounting to 500-600,000 tons per year of Weee undergoing incorrect treatment processes. This phenomenon of “parallel flows” exerts heavy impacts on the environment and relevant consequences from the economic point of view: the virtuous Weee recycling industry manages only 250,000 tons of wastes per year; if it could treat all flows (that is to say quantities exceeding three times the current ones), it might be much more competitive and make the necessary investments to attain better results in terms of recycling of secondary raw materials. The second weak point is the incomplete regulation: two years after the Legislative Decree 49/2014,numerous decrees are still missing, including the implementation decree about the treatment quality, indispensable to avoid that the authorizations for the Weee treatment are released, as it happens now, to subjects that do not use suitable processes from the environmental point of view, thus granting a “levelled playing field”, the decree about the typical statute that Collective Systems will have to suit, the decree about the financial guarantees that producers should provide at the time of the release of a new Eee on the market and the decree about the implementation modalities of the “one against zero” collection of very small size Weee by distributors. With the hope that these devices do not introduce new bureaucratic burdens at the charge of producers, distributors and final consumers.
On what strategies will Ecodom develop its actions to improve the process of recovery and recycling of Weee in the next years?
Since 2008 Ecodom has availed itself of specialized companies, identified through a rigorous selection process, verifying that all of its suppliers are accredited by the Weee Coordination Centre according to what provided for by the agreement about quality signed by the Centre itself and the associations of the recycling subjects. Secondly, it monitors suppliers’ performances during the service execution, both in terms of efficiency and of environmental protection, through audits by the plants, with stricter environmental requisites for the suppliers that treat the Weee of Group R1. Moreover, Ecodom is among the founder members of Weeelabex Organization and it has promoted an alliance with other six among the most important Collective Systems, with which it represents almost 90% of all Weee treated in Italy, to start a process of quality improvement of the Weee treatment in Italy, asking the plants that execute such activities to operate in compliance with the Weeelabex standard. This is what we already do and will go on doing. There are however two very important aspects that I would like to underline. The first is of economic nature. In the contracts with treatment suppliers, Ecodom has introduced an indexation mechanism, connected with the market value of secondary raw materials: when that value rises, the Consortium pays a lower amount to suppliers; when, vice versa, that value decreases, the Consortium pays a higher sum to its suppliers. Target of this mechanism, thanks to which treatment suppliers can rely on constant total revenues (sum of the amount paid by Ecodom and of the revenues deriving from the sale of secondary raw materials), consists in assuring that such suppliers maintain a high qualitative standard even under unfavourable market situations. This form of “fair compensation”, which was particularly useful in the second half of 2015, when the value of secondary raw materials (in particular iron and plastic) was affected by a real drop, is not however used by any other Collective system in Italy: I hope that others follow our example as well, because the environment protection task – which the law entrusts to Eee producers – must precede any consideration of economic nature. The second aspect is the “levelled playing field”: the commitment to quality of Ecodom and of our suppliers is useless if the State cannot exact and attain the same quality also from all the subjects that intercept and treat the flows of Weee not managed by Collective Systems. It is therefore fundamental that the decree about the treatment quality, which I hope will contain precise modalities for the verification of the processes used by the plants, is issued as soon as possible.
