Electrical items

What is WEEE?

WEEE is Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. It is end-of-life/unwanted or unusable electrical and electronic equipment and covers virtually everything with a plug or battery. There are also items we would find very difficult to do without such as cookers, washing machines or fridges. Items that cannot be repaired need to be quickly replaced.

The retailers who make and sell electrical and electronic items are required by law to help with the costs of recovering and recycling these items when they come to the end of their lives.

Electrical reuse

You can take your old washing machine or fridge to:

By donating items for reuse, you may be helping a family who may not be able to afford a brand new item for themselves.

There are some recycling centres in West Cheshire that take all types of electrical items such as fridges, freezers, TVs, monitors, irons etc. Chester, Ellesmere Port, Winsford, Northwich and Neston all have reuse shops on site. You can take your old/unwanted items to the reuse shop and Changing Lives will collect them.

Changing Lives Together

‘Changing Lives Together’ is a charity with branches in Ellesmere Port and Winsford that helps and supports local residents.

They are an approved authorised treatment facility, which means that they have been approved by the government regulator to carry out treatment work and can collect WEEE and carry out the reuse and recycling of large domestic appliances and fridges.

They carry out important safety checks on all electrical appliances at their facility in Winsford and then sell the appliances at affordable prices in their stores.

Recycling process

If you want to know what happens to your waste once your green box has been emptied, you can watch a video about it on our YouTube channel. You can also watch a video about what happens to larger items from the recycling centre.

Cheshire West Recycling manage the collection and recycling of small WEEE from the kerbside recycling scheme. This Council owned company work with UK re-processors (St Helens, Liverpool or Manchester). All recycling processors are regulated by the Environment Agency, and approved by us.

More information about recycling electrical waste can be found on our interesting recycling facts page.