The Portuguese Association for the Management of Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment, Amb3e (Associação Portuguesa de Gestão de Resíduos de Equipamentos Eléctricos e Electrónicos) is a private, non-profit association whose mission is the management of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE).

At the moment, Amb3E has 60 local branches, almost 1,000 members and 480 WEEE drop-off centres, in a country with less than 11 million inhabitants.

However, our Portuguese colleagues had a lot of work to do until they managed to create such an infrastructure. The need to create this national network was shown by a 2008 behavioural survey. The researched revealed that 38.4% of the respondents declared that they had never handed over any objects to a drop-off centre and only 28.5% handed over one object to such centres. Almost half of the respondents said that they had simply left the old or broken equipment in the street to be picked up by public waste collection services.
Starting from the situation presented by the market study, the association launched its first TV campaign in 2009 and the results were soon visible. In 2009, Amb3e collected 45,000 tons of WEEE, 36% more than in the previous year.

The system seems so well organised that the associations requests its collection partners to send a written notification, well in advance, if they intend to deliver at the drop-off centres large quantities of WEEE in a single transport.

Nevertheless, the Portuguese association has to work hard to make WEEE collection become part of the citizens’ life style. Because, surprisingly (!!!), the Portuguese declared that they would prefer to get discounts when buying new appliances in exchange for old or broken equipment handed over for recycling, meaning that they would prefer collection at the electrical and electronic equipment shops rather than in drop-off centres.

Despite all this, people need to get rid of the old appliances in their homes and they hand them over to drop-off centres, thus proving to be… European citizens.