Cyprus missing recycling goals

Cyprus still lags far behind its goals for recycling batteries, electronics and electronic devices, an audit office report said.
The report also found that there is insufficient supervision of the licenced companies that arrange to recycle these items by the environment department.
It said that Cyprus had failed to meet the minimum recycling goals set by the EU Directive on Batteries and Accumulators and by the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (weee) Directive.
The collection percentage of Afis – the only licenced recycling system for batteries and accumulators in Cyprus – was 27.34 per cent last year, lower than the 45 per cent set by the directive, the report said.
Afis cooperates with a local company that collects the batteries and temporarily stores them in a facility in Cyprus until they are shipped to a Belgian company for processing.
There were no exports in 2014 and 2015, the report said, and as a result a large quantity of used batteries has accumulated in the storage space of the Afis subcontractor.
As regards recycling of electrical and electronic equipment, WEEE Electrocyclosis Cyprus Ltd, the only licenced system on the island in his field, managed in 2015 to collect 65.7per cent of the 3,000 tonnes provided by the directive as minimum goal. An increase was recorded, however, from 2014, when the percentage was 52,5 per cent.
The environment department has yet to report last year’s results, the report said, as the law is not being applied to the full, meaning that not all producers of weee register with the collective system. This does not make possible the calculation of the average weight of weee produced in Cyprus. This is necessary for calculating the minimum annual collection percentage since the beginning of 2016, the report said.
It added that WEEE Electrocyclosis Cyprus Ltd cooperates with a number of companies for the collection, transport, storage, sorting and management of the weee with which it has signed contracts.
The audit office said that it found the environment department is not being informed by these two recycling systems of the contracts, or their terms. It added that the environment department has never audited the economic conditions of contractors, ‘despite the cost of the collective systems being essentially passed on to producers of batteries and accumulators and weee and then to consumers”.
An important factor in the effective management of the waste, it said, is that importers and manufacturers must assume responsibility for the funding and operation of infrastructure where consumers could return a product when it is no longer considered usable to be properly handled. The report proposes collective or individual waste treatment systems, licenced by the agriculture ministry and supervised by the environment department.

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