# WEEE Recycling and Circular Economy Assisted by Collaborative Robots +
## 1 Introduction  
Waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) coming from household appliances, information technology and telecommunications equipment is rising all over the world at increasing rates. Some reasons accounting for this are fast technological changes, consumers' desire for the latest electronics products and difficulties to repair them. It should be noted that WEEE is one of the fastest waste streams. In 2016, an average e-waste of 16 kg/person was generated in the European Union (EU) [1] and the total amount in this area is projected to reach more than 12 million tons by 2020 [2]. As a result, landfill sites are filling up with WEEE, and a shortage of raw materials for these products is envisaged for the next years. On one hand, e-waste contains dangerous materials such as mercury, flame retardants, lead, chromium, barium, and cadmium, that must be separated and treated [3], which implies consumer awareness to return e-waste to separate collection points. Unfortunately, an important part of e-waste is still dumped illegally in poor countries and dismantled carelessly,causing serious health problems and poisoning the soil, water and air. However, on the other hand, these products also contain valuable materials such as gold, copper, iron, aluminum. New circular economy models are a promising solution to tackle both issues since they can imitate natural ecosystems by taking advantage of cyclic processes in order to reuse and recycle as much as possible. The EU Circular Economy Package attempts to close the loop by complementing the measures contained in the legislative proposals and to contribute to meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015 [4]. Moreover, the recently launched European Green Deal [5] aims to \"transform the EU into a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy, where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases in 2050 and where economic growth is decoupled from resource use\". As a matter of fact, one of its main elements is focused on \"mobilizing industry for a clean and circular economy\". Consequently, once end-of-life products are depolluted, valuable materials can be reintroduced in the market as secondary materials, thus extracting value from them and reducing the need for new materials. It must also be noted that moving to higher levels of the waste hierarchy in order to extend product lifetimes is not an easy task, due to consumer reticence towards second-hand items and difficulties in repairing end-of-life products. The EU has put in place two directives to address the e-waste challenges: the Directive on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE Directive) and the Directive on the restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment (RoHS Directive). The main goals of this legislation are to improve waste management processes, eliminate hazardous substances, increase recycling capacity and introduce harmonizing legislation among the different European countries. In addition, these directives focus on producer responsibility to increase product recycling by making producers financially responsible for their products at the end of life. This aspect is very important because it is only through producers taking advantage of eco-design that the WEEE will achieve the goal of preventing so much electronic waste being generated [6]. Figure 1 shows the quantities of collected and treated WEEE. The first directive sets a collection target of 4 kg per inhabitant of WEEE from private households [8]. The EU 28 countries have complied with the collection rate target with 8.02 kg/capita collected for WEEE from households in 2017 [9]. In Spain, with a collection rate of 5.63 kg per inhabitant in that year and an increasing trend, the target has also been reached [9]. From 2018, the Directive was extended from a restricted scope to all categories of EEE, yet the gap between current results and future collection targets is very significant.