Today I tried to translate “Rücknahmeverpflichtung” into English. Essentially R. means that producers of harmful goods (e.g. computers) are required to dispose of their products once the consumers don’t use them any more. Babelfish at altavista came up with “cancelling obligation” and dict.leo.org suggested “obligation to take back”. Luckily I remembered (with some support of eu.int) that there is an EU Directive, number 2002/96/EG, that deals with the subject.
Googling for 2002/96/EG should be easy enough to bring up a plethora of hits in English — I thought. But Google taught me otherwise. You can get 2002/96/EG in German, in Dutch, in Swedish, even in Polish, but to find a first hit in English took a lot of scrolling …
This, so it seems, is another element of Britain 2005ff. Let the others sort their rubbish — we British are rubbish anyway, so it does not matter, does it, whether we sort or recycle or just dump. It’s more important to remove these people from our shores who would not want to live in and as rubbish.
Oh, by the way, I still don’t know what “Rücknahmeverpflichtung” means in English…