Page 105 - Implementation of ITU-T international standards for sustainable management of waste electrical and electronic equipment: The path to a circular economy in Costa Rica

Implementation of ITU-T international standards for sustainable management of waste
electrical and electronic equipment: The path to a circular economy in Costa Rica

• General Directorate of Customs of the Ministry of Finance
• National Institute of Statistics and Census

• Ministry of Environment and Energy
– Identify all sources of information with enough validity, whether primary or secondary
sources, for the elaboration of the WEEE inventory and material flows and balances.
– Identify and contact all the actors such as importers, distributors, trading companies,
consumers, and managers.
– Identify the various classifications of natural and legal persons and their role within the
EEE and WEEE value chain. This supplements the previous point to restrict the scope of
the inventory if necessary. It is consistent with the information on imports.
– Select the tracers based on the information available and the capacity to develop the
inventory. A country’s representative criteria should be used, e.g., importance of domestic
production and imports of EEE, aspects of environmental impacts, and health impacts,
among others. Consideration should be given to bindings with actors in order to complete
material flows and balances.
– Combining the WEEE estimation methodologies may achieve better results on the WEEE
inventory, material flows and balances since it would generate information on the EEE
inventory in use and equipment kept in hibernation by users.
– To design the study of flows and material balances, it is important to have previous
experience in processes modelling.
– Databases (inter alia, imports, exports, managers, and managed WEEE) have quite a
lot of useful data for the study. Considering that data have different formats and units,
the objective of the study must be clear and the dynamics of WEEE management in the
country must be known when analysing the data.
– Import and export databases must contain the following key information:

• Importer or exporter identification
• Type of regime: import or export
• Type of movement: definitive, temporary, reimport, free zone, transit. It is recommended
to work with data from the definitive movements.
• Year of import or export
• Six-digit Harmonized System Tariff Code (HS)
• Quantities in commercial units

• Net weight
• Units in which the net weight is reported. Inventory is reported in kilograms or tonnes.
– Review databases data quality. This allows the identification of erroneous values and
abnormal behaviours, and enables a global vision of imports behaviour to be obtained.
– The information gathered from the surveys permits an evaluation of the existing
management system or the obtaining of information for designing the national system.
The questions of the surveys may be adapted to the objective pursued.
– Disaggregate the information on importers into groups considered relevant in the
commercialization chain. This allows differentiating among EEE streams in the national
flow and the movements between actors. In addition, movements and quantities of EEE
associated with imports for commercialization can be identified in order to apply REP. This
information is key to developing WEEE system graphs and mass flow.
– A detailed identification of hotspots will provide a comprehensive overview in order to
establish the work plan for the national system.

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