Background Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) contains a complex mixture of materials and components containing dangerous substances such as mercury, lead, cadmium, chromium, asbestos and arsenic. These hazardous components create environmental risks that are not properly dealt with by current waste management practice. Furthermore, both technological innovation and market expansion continue to increase the dangers posed. To adequately address the environmental issues associated with the current methods for the treatment and disposal of WEEE, measures are needed that aim, firstly, at the prevention of WEEE, secondly, at the re-use, recycling and other forms of recovery of such wastes and, thirdly, at minimising the risks and impacts to the environment from the treatment and disposal of WEEE. Mobile phone batteries contain harmful chemical substances such as nickel, cadmium, and cobalt, which can pollute soil and underground waters if they are disposed of in landfills. In Europe today, it is estimated that there are about 260 million mobile phones and that nearly 40 percent will be replaced in the next 6-8 months. In Italy alone, 966 tonnes of batteries were disposed of in 1999 and the forecast for 2010 is 2,550 tonnes. The disposal of mobile phones is therefore a growing environmental issue. The 2002 Community Directive 2002/96/CE provided for the collection of WEEE separately from the collection of urban waste, and for particular and specific treatment to be carried out on the WEEE. Objectives The project planned to create an integrated centre, on Tred Carpi’s premises, for the recycling and valorisation of materials deriving from technological refuse. It would act as a centralised collecting centre for differentiated waste collection - including plastics, glass and cans – and use specific machinery and technologies to recycle special and dangerous wastes. The project aimed to improve and extend the separate collection points for technological waste with the cooperation of local authorities and private companies involved in the collection of waste. It would then focus on using new technologies to recycle television cathode tubes, computers, electric tools and mobile phone batteries. It sought to develop an integrated and cost-effective system to recycle cathode tubes and recover glass as raw material and implement an innovative technological process for the efficient recycling and recovery of mobile phone batteries, which can be used to create energy for electric vehicles. Results The project succeeded in using specific machinery to separate the cathode tube from the other parts of the television set and then break down and wash the tubes to render them recyclable. Innovative machinery automatically cuts the cathode tubes just along the line where the two different types of glass are joined, which enables recycling of more than 90% of the glass. The cathode tube recycling plant is able to treat about 5,000 tons of devices per year and produce about 1,200 tons per year of recovered glass and other recycled materials. Furthermore, the technologies used in the project are easily accessible to the vast majority of the companies possibly interested in reproducing the demonstrated processes. This means that the recovery of more than 90 percent of the material could reasonably become a legal requirement in the future. A further system was developed to disassemble the elements of mobile phone batteries and then reassemble them to make new batteries for other functions. The developed system is able to select the batteries according to their type, quality and technical status, sending the selected batteries to their appropriate destination. Non-recognisable batteries are disposed of, whilst non-exhausted rechargeable batteries are assembled and installed in battery-powered devices. Exhausted batteries are sent to the recycling system, where they are ground down and their components separated off and recovered as new raw material. At the end of the project, tests on the running conditions of the prototype for the battery recycling plant were still required to demonstrate the full economic feasibility of the battery recycling process. However, there is good reason to believe the recycling will have positive economic results and a study of the market for the finished batteries was foreseen to help guide efforts towards optimum economic performance of the whole system. The project was able to demonstrate that both cathode tube and mobile phone battery recycling is possible. It can therefore act as a benchmark for efforts elsewhere to recycle dangerous technological waste and promote improved performance across Europe.