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Countering the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Illegal Trade - CWIT project

Final conference, 25-26 June 2015

Lyon -

UNICRI is pleased to announce the upcoming final conference of the Countering Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Illegal Trade Project (CWIT) – a project funded by the European Union under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013). The conference will take place on 25 and 26 June 2015 in Lyon (France) at the INTERPOL Headquarters.

Countering illegal trade in WEEE, is a challenging, and actual topic for governments, industries and academics alike. WEEE contains valuable and critical materials, such as gold, copper and palladium, next to hazardous substances, for example mercury and cadmium. Citizen and employee health and safety issues, environmental protection topics as well as raw-material re-use related economic aspects all call for increased attention and enhanced enforcement in the context of eWaste trade, transport and treatment. The fact that only around 3 million tons of the estimated total of 9 million tons in waste in electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), was officially collected, treated and reported to authorities across Europe in 2012, raises several concerns among the various WEEE-stakeholders.

The CWIT consortium is taking on the challenge of providing a set of recommendations aimed at authorities and stakeholders to assist them in countering WEEE illegal trade. The CWIT final conference will be interactive in nature, allowing for dialogue with recyclers, producers, producer responsibility organizations, enforcement agencies, policymakers, prosecutors and the academia. The consortium will present the final project recommendations, for example its findings about the “WEEE market”, WEEE flows and actors involved in recycling and trade, as well as the factors driving criminal groups towards illegal trade of WEEE.

The conference will address the five following topics:

  • Collect more, prevent leakage
  • Trading, treatment and the economics behind criminal behaviour
  • Robust and uniform legal framework, implementation and enforcement
  • Best practices in enforcement and prosecution
  • CWIT 2020: Roadmap to crime free WEEE trade and a circular economy

For registration and more information, please visit the conference web page.