On 14-15 September 2023, the three Spanish PROs of the WEEE Forum: Fundación Ecolec, Fundación Ecotic and Recyclia, hosted the association’s General Assembly session in Madrid.  

Kicking off the shared agenda, WEEE Forum Members and ECOSWEEE partners joined a hybrid meeting to discuss the latest updates on the project pilots. The project explores the ways of enhancing small e-waste collection. One of the potential solutions to address the issue of small electronic waste items not arriving to the appropriate recycling stream are incentives. This is why, upon invitation by Ecologic, Dimitri Naczaj from Bellegarde Scientific Consulting held a session on consumer behaviour while other partners shared the results from their country specific surveys and showed the practical way of implementing these into communication and collection campaigns.  

The Operations Committee meeting focused heavily on collection targets with presentations by Scott Buttler from Material Focus (UK), Elzbieta Stobbe from ElektroEko (Poland), Jason Linnell from the National Center for Electronics Recycling (USA), and Néstor Hincapié from Red Verde (Colombia). Closing this eventful day, partners were taken on a tour around Derichebourg’s local treatment plant to see the state-of-the-art fridge recycling facility.  

The General Assembly itself was led by the key theme of critical raw materials (CRMs), WEEE advocacy in light of the revision of the WEEE Directive, and the upcoming European elections. Lorenzo Tavazzi from The European House – Ambrosetti elaborated on the importance of critical raw materials for the Italian economy and Luca Campadello from Erion reinforced the meaning of the CRM Act for PROs. Last not but least, keeping members on schedule, Elise Tingvoll from Tingvoll outlined the adoption of the CRM Act and its timeline as well as the 2024 European Election.  

Pascal Leroy, Director General of the WEEE Forum, talked over the strategy and the role of grant-funded innovation projects for members. Concluding the event a vote on two new membership applications took place, bringing the membership to 52 producer responsibility schemes.   

“We are very grateful to our members in Spain for the organisation of such an insightful session and their warm hospitality. We see our organisation going from strength to strength with over 70 individuals attending both onsite and online. We are extremely proud that the membership is growing, and that we can serve as a platform for sharing best practices in such difficult times of climate and raw materials crisis” says Pascal Leroy, Director General of the WEEE Forum. “Seeing the enthusiasm, the creativity and the practical know how of our members who see opportunities where others see challenges, make me feel optimistic and motivated to carry on our daily work on tackling the e-waste challenge” he continued.