First cars, then fridges and now everything from mobile phones to singing Christmas cards is to fall within the bounds of the EU's great recycling plan. According to European Parliament statistics, electro-scrap is piling up at a rate of six million tonnes annually and is the fastest-growing waste stream in the EU. A sizeable amount of this is produced in the UK, increasing by five per cent a year. Nine-tenths of this is disposed of through landfill and incineration, both of which can lead to environmental contamination by substances including lead and cadmium. As the sale of consumer electronics including mobile phones has boomed, little effort has gone into recycling. Faced with this environmental time bomb, the EU has decided that at last the polluters must pay.
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