Reuse and Recycling

What happens next?

Since 2001, El-Kretsen has been striving to recover as much material as possible from the WEEE and batteries we collect. In cooperation with our pre-treatment suppliers (involving sorting, dismantling and fragmenting) and recyclers, our circumstances have continued to improve alongside the processing technologies.

El-Kretsen collects most of the small batteries and consumer WEEE that is returned in Sweden, and this gives us the chance to actually influence developments and make sure that we return as much and as pure raw material as possible.

Our recycling includes stages of increasingly refined sorting and grading. In the pre-treatment facilities, hazardous waste is removed from the collected materials. Damaged and dangerous products are not suitable for reuse as they could harm the user. Recyclers manually remove batteries and other environmentally hazardous components before finally sorting everything according to material type. Through a journey of dismantling, sorting and fragmenting, the waste products are converted to raw materials. Metal recycling saves up to 95 per cent of the energy used when mining virgin metals – and the great thing about metals is that they can be reused over and over again.

Do you want to see statistics for the volumes and materials we have recovered?
Visit our web page Sustainability Library

Do you want to know more about the recycling process?

You will find more information about collection and recycling under the heading “El-Kretsen collects”

Pre-treatment

Reuse

If a product is still viable, handing it in to be reused is generally a better alternative than handing it in for material recovery. No matter how clearly we communicate that we only want to collect products that are broken, very old or worn out, we always find some items that could have been used a little longer. Whether these items move on to be reused depends both on their state and on the demand for this particular kind of product. Just as we have to find clever solutions for material recovery, the trick is to find clever solutions for reuse so that we all benefit genuinely in the end.