Paul,
To be fair to the EU Commission, they sort of do have a point. As you've said we've mountains of waste electrical / electronic material being disposed of every year. Cheaper manufacturing etc is definitely producing more waste. At the very least this new directive provides an insentive for manufacturers to make their products fully recyclable. They have to be designed so that they can be dismantled by a recycling plant and the components recovered.
Something has to be done about it that's for sure. You've got people junking all sorts of machinery that would have been repaired in the past.
