WEEE Directive, RoHS Directive and Data Protection Act (1988)

WEEE Directive

The WEEE Directive is aimed at reducing the amount of electrical and electronic waste that goes into landfill. Manufacturers, distributors and resellers of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (such as IT equipment), must provide adequate recycling channels.

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RoHS Directive

The RoHS directive is aimed at reducing the amount of harmful substances used in manufacturing and to ensure that equipment containing any harmful substances is disposed of in an environmentally friendly way. Organisations that produce just 200kg or more of hazardous waste per year will need to register annually with the Environment Agency (under the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Act). This amount equates to around 10-15 PC’s and monitors! It is an offence to dispose of hazardous waste unless registered, and for waste carriers to collect waste from an unregistered site (unless exemptions apply). A valid consignment note must be issued by your waste carrier for the disposal of any amount of hazardous waste even if you do not need to register as a hazardous waste producer.

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Data Protection Act (1998)

Under the Data Protection Act (1988), it is your legal responsibility to ensure personal information about your staff or clients does not enter the public domain. The only way to guarantee compliance is to wipe (not format) the hard disk with specialist software or physically destroy the drive through shredding. Even compliance with the WEEE and RoHS directives, does not demonstrate reasonable steps to comply with the Act. Data wiping is a time consuming process that most companies do not know how to do (this is not formatting the hard disk – which is recoverable).

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