Page 35 - 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

INTE G8:2013 “Integrated management system for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises”
and INTE ISO 14001 “Environmental management systems. Requirements with guidance for
use” for waste managers to implement quality and environmental management systems and
their certification. Regarding occupational health and safety, Costa Rica has extensive legislation.
Its purpose is to set up requirements, general and specific by sector or activity, for the protection
of workers in the national territory. By 2020, 50 per cent of the managers authorized by the
Ministry of Health for WEEE management were involved in some of the processes – dismantling,
recovery or treatment – of WEEE.

Recommendation ITU-T L.1032 underlines the importance of its application in parallel to
national legislation and technical requirements. The Government of Costa Rica considers the
implementation of Recommendation ITU-T L.1032 as an opportunity to supplement the existing
regulatory framework. This standard allows the level of security and environmental requirements
compliance by managers to be established. This, in turn, allows the creation of national strategies
and mechanisms to improve WEEE dismantling and material take-back processes in a worker-
safe and environmentally friendly way, so achieving a sustainable management of this kind of
waste.

3 Implementation of Recommendation ITU-T L.1031: Case of

Costa Rica

Recommendation ITU-T L.1031 was implemented following the three phases described in
Figure 1. In Phase 1, the implementation focused on the development of a comprehensive
inventory, as shown in Figure 2.

An in-depth analysis of the results was performed to identify improvement opportunities for
SINEGIRE, which enabled the development recommendations to strengthen Costa Rica’s
management system, with an approach based on circularity and sustainability.

The process to implement Recommendation ITU-T L.1031 is summarized in Figure 10.

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