A Junk Heap to Cherish.(recycling industry, European Union)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

Rogier de Bode is in the business of crushing discarded refrigerators. And these days, business is good. Four or five trucks a day dump their wares at his plant on the outskirts of Dordrecht in the Netherlands, and there's plenty more out there. Each year 650,000 fridges are thrown away in the Netherlands, and De Bode's company, Coolrec, holds the exclusive contract to prepare them for recycling. For 18 hours a day, his workers load each fridge carcass onto a conveyor belt. In 10 minutes it is mechanically ripped apart and chewed into small fragments, then sorted automatically into its component materials. Noxious chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases from the insulation are stripped out and stored before they're allowed to damage Earth's ozone layer. Eighty percent of a typical refrigerator finds its way back into the production cycle.

Now Europe is following the Dutch lead and taking the green movement to the manufacturers of white goods and electronics. A spate of legislation emerging from Brussels aims ultimately to hold manufacturers responsible for the fate of their products long after they've left store shelves or car showrooms. They're being told they must ensure that as much as 85 percent of their products is recycled or reused, and the remainder disposed of in environmentally sound ways. As in the Netherlands, that may call for byzantine collection arrangements to funnel goods to the recyclers. "The EU is really leading the world," says Mark Strutt of Greenpeace. "The politicians want to break the link between waste and economic growth."

Something surely needs to be done. In recent decades consumers have grown used to an ever-speedier turnover of hardware. A computer built in the 1960s lasted 10 years on average; now they are scrapped in just four. Europe's junk heap of electronic goods now weighs 6 million tons and will double in 12 years. In the past more than 90 percent of this detritus had been buried in landfills, burned in incinerators or abandoned by the side of the road. The same went for the 15 million cars junked in Europe each year. "This is a major problem for Europe," says Graeme Maxton of the motor-industry consultancy Autopolis. "America has vast areas of land to dump its cars. Europe hasn't." All this waste is taking an obvious toll on the planet. Environmentalists aren't alone in fretting over a list of noxious elements--notably lead, mercury and cadmium--that may be finding their way into the air, soil and water. Says Garel Rhys, a motor-industry economist at Cardiff University: "Manufacturers just have to accept that this is what society wants."

Even at this early stage in Europe's recycling experiment, though, the new laws have already caused unintended problems. Some European countries have been caught wholly unprepared. Because of the new regulations, waste sites and incinerators throughout Europe are being inundated with hardware. ...