Pretreatment of Electrical and Electronic Waste

The second step in the collection process is pretreatment. When electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) waste is transported to a facility, it undergoes thorough sorting to ensure all material is handled correctly.

Pretreatment is a necessary step in the recycling process. Without pretreatment, very few products could be recycled at all — and recycling is essential for reducing climate impact. Recycling metals, for example, saves up to 95 percent more energy compared with using virgin raw materials. The great advantage of metals is that they can be recycled an unlimited number of times.

The Pretreatment Process

Each container collected from recycling centres and other collection points has its own unique ID number, allowing all collected material to be traced. Through manual sorting, built-in batteries are removed, along with other components classified as hazardous waste. These are placed in separate containers depending on how they should be handled or recycled. Products that are intact and suitable for reuse are directed into a separate flow. The rest proceeds to the next step in the process — shredding and sorting by material type.

The sorted and pretreated material is then sent on to the next stage. This is where the resources from electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) and batteries are transformed into new raw materials.

El-Kretsen’s Recyclers

El-Kretsen works with around 30 recyclers, known as pretreatment operators (förbehandlare), across Sweden. Some product categories can be handled by most pretreatment operators, while others require more specialised treatment that only certain recyclers can offer. In this list, you can see which recyclers El-Kretsen works with – and which product categories they can handle.