With the introduction of the UK WEEE Regulations in 2007, WEEE waste was a headache for a lot of waste management companies until specialists started popping up who catered in the collection, recycling and destruction of this specific type of waste. That was the start of what is an industry within an industry. Skip Hire Magazine spoke to Rob Seal, managing director of U-Can Recycling, a social enterprise based in Leeds.
Can you tell us a bit about U-Can?
We’re a social enterprise – we’re classed as a CIC, which means a Community Interest Company. So we don’t exist solely for commercial profit, we try to put something back in the community. We employ people that have been long term unemployed. We work with schools and community groups to do subsidised recycling schemes and we do various training programmes and charities including Age UK. So we’re like a commercial business that tries to do good things on the side!
How did you set up the business?
We set up the company in June 2010 and we moved in to our current premises a year ago. It was me on the telephone for the first six months, just brokering deals. Since we’ve moved in to these new premises, we’re slowly concentrating on just WEEE recycling. We’ve got simple machinery like a forklift truck and a baler, and now we’ve just invested in a hard drive shredder which acts a mobile shredder. This means I can just put it in a van and go out to whomever wants very secure data shredding and let them see it get shredded on site, for their own peace of mind. That’s quite an investment for us because it’s nearly £20,000 of kit.
So, explain the process of recycling a PC.
We have a free van collection service that goes out to businesses. They’ll drop off the relevant paperwork, the waste transfer notice, we’ll bring it back to our place and the first thing we’ll do is try to get things working – we’ll test it to see if it’s workable, the second thing is that we’ll diagnose what the problem is. If it’s beyond fixing, we’ll break it down to it components parts to see if any of that is working. If your TV breaks there’s usually something small, a bulb or something that needs fixing, but most of the time, you can’t be bothered, so it gets chucked out. So if there’s five components in the computer, four of them are still working – so we strip them down to the parts, test them, and sell the parts via our eBay business and the rest of the computer will get recycled in to the component parts. So, all the metal goes together, we bulk it up until we have a few tonnes of metal, we bale it into our baler so we have a nice neat cube and that will go to a scrap merchant. The beauty of what we do is that everything is almost 100% recyclable, but we have so little waste cos we have a home for every element of WEEE recycling.
Is the diagnostic stage of it quite labour intensive?
Not really, there are simple tests that you can do – we do the power on/power off. If there’s no life at all, that usually means that there’s a board fault. We can’t fix board faults here, that’s quite time consuming and a specialist business and probably not worth the expense. If it’s something simple like a processor or memory or power supply, we can test that within half an hour. The computer can be broken down in two minutes. So there are three men on air power tools, and within a couple of minutes there’s twelve key parts to a computer – and that’s how you recycle it.
How did you develop it to where it is now?
It takes two hands to clap, and especially when you start off in business, you need to encourage and nurture relationships. I’ve got a range of companies who I work with who I know will give me the best prices for various materials. Say we’ve got ten or fifteen different waste streams, I’ll send off various components off to various specialists. It’s amazing what people specialise in. There’s thirteen different WEEE categories and specialists within each one and it’s about building up that knowledge over time. There’s lot of reciprocal business – I’ll send a metal merchant some scrap, and he’ll send me back something that I can utilise or sell.
It’s not a small industry either. My background is in marketing, and I was made redundant in 2009 and I decided on a bit of a career change. I decided to get in to metals and the recycling industry and I thought it was a small industry – but going around and seeing the level of investment some of the bigger companies have made, it’s phenomenal.
Do you deal with skip hire companies, who generate a lot of computer waste?
There’s a few skip hire companies in Leeds who we deal with. A lot of the metal merchants who we deal with have a skip hire arm to their business. I deal with a few of the major waste companies and try to do a bit of brokering of some of their materials. The metal guys have skips too, so it’s an amazingly big sector.
We are trying to grow the business – we’re getting a new license in the next few weeks, which is what they call the AATF license, which gives us a little more credence, and it means we’re a slightly bigger player, and means we can get more national business hopefully.
Has there been many changes in the industry in the past few years?
One part of the WEEE industry that makes a lot of money is the compliance schemes sector. These scheme have been brought in to control or manage the take back scheme from companies. For example, Sony have to recycle something like 50% of the products that they sell. So they have to sign up to a compliance scheme that handle their recycling. So, there’s been around 40 compliance schemes that have been set up in the past few years that have a lot of power, and have got control over all this material from B&Q, from Sony etc, etc and are dishing it all out to recycling companies of their choice. TNT have a compliance arm to their business, it’s thought that they make more money out of their compliance business than their actual freight and courier business.
So, it must work in your favour then?
Well yes and no. It involves getting under the radar of these compliance companies, you’ve got to have the correct license in place, and then work on the relationship with them so you can bid for the IT waste – as they essentially sell it on. The larger corporate clients are signed up to compliance schemes, and so you have to work through the hierarchy.
What about disposing of confidential data?
Confidential data destruction is a high profile topic at the moment. Companies have to be very careful as to how they dispose of their data now, that’s why we decided to invest heavily in to a piece of machinery called a Data Degaussing Machine where you put your hard drives in to it, and it just blasts the data. We’ve also got an onsite shredding machine so it’s a sector we’re keen to get in to.
Everything we receive in to the yard gets scanned and categorised, whether it’s a pile of scrap or a laptop, so it’s recordable – because that’s what the Environment Agency want to see – stuff coming in, stuff coming out, so they can monitor the volumes of WEEE scrap that are being recycled. They are working to the EU Directive that by the year 2019, 65% IT and WEEE scrap will be recycled. At the moment, the UK is lagging behind a load of other countries; I think out of a list of sixteen countries, we’re twelfth, just above countries like Poland and Bulgaria. But we’ve still got a long way to go.