TITLE:
Perspectives of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment in Tampico, Mexico
AUTHORS:
René Bernardo Elías Cabrera-Cruz, María Esther Bautista-Vargas, Julio César Rolón-Aguilar, Ricardo Tobías-Jaramillo, Alberto José Gordillo-Martínez
KEYWORDS:
WEEE, Management, Tampico, EIA
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Environmental Protection,
Vol.5 No.12,
September
29,
2014
ABSTRACT: Waste
electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) has brought negative effects to the
environment produced by the materials that compose them. The proper
implementation of management plans of WEEE should integrate measures to
prevent, mitigate and correct these affectations. As an initial step, it is
necessary to make a diagnosis of the current situation of WEEE management which
is the objective of this work. The studied zone was composed by the
municipalities of Tampico, Ciudad Madero and Altamira located in southeast
Tamaulipas, Mexico. The descriptive analysis of technical and regulatory
aspects of the current management system in the study area was developed,
including generation rates and analysis of waste streams. Among the main
results, the generation of WEEE was estimated in 2040.38 tons/year for 2013,
distributed in the municipalities of Tampico with 830.93 tons/year, Altamira
with 650.18 tons/year, and Ciudad Madero with 559.27 tons/year. This
calculation was estimated using Mexico’s WEEE generation indicators. The
analysis of waste streams includes five categories of WEEE, Televisions with
61% of the total generation, followed by sound devices with 18%, personal
computers with 17%; mobile phones with 2% as well as fixed phones with 1%. In
the study area, reports of Tampico’s municipality indicated that 96 tons of
WEEE was collected in the city of Tampico in 2013. In México, the national
legislation considers WEEE in the category of waste requiring special handling
(WRSH), however, it exists an inadequacy in the environmental laws about the
specific classification of this kind of debris that makes their effective
management more difficult. No companies who provide a management or treatment
operations for WEEE are reported in Tampico, or in the near region. In
addition, despite an initial interest for the municipality to attend the WEEE
problematic, it exists a lack of sensibility of the population in the absence
of environmental education programs.