Amended WEEE legislation laid in Parliament

The governments overhaul of the regulations on the recycling of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) has been formally approved, after the supporting legislation was laid in Parliament yesterday (December 11).

The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations 2013 were brought in by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in its response to the consultation on bringing the requirements of the recast EU WEEE Directive into UK law (see letsrecycle.com story).

Changes were also brought in to address concerns from producers that the cost of compliance with the regulations did not reflect the true cost of recycling.

Key among the changes, which come into effect on January 1, is the introduction of mandatory collection targets for compliance schemes.

This is intended to prevent the trading of evidence between schemes which producers claim was leading to an increase in the overall cost that they were paying for compliance with the regulations.

Target

Currently, schemes issue evidence notes per tonne of WEEE collected to fulfil the recycling obligation of their producer members. Any excess evidence generated by schemes can be sold to those who have not been able to gather enough evidence to meet their members obligations.

However, from January each compliance scheme will be given a tonnage target by category of EEE placed onto the market in proportion to the UK target and the total market share of their members during the previous year. Schemes will be notified of their target by the end of the first quarter of 2014.

Fee

Over-collecting schemes will be required to finance the excess or retain the income, and under-collecting schemes will have to pay a compliance fee per tonne of WEEE it has been unable to collect or face sanctions for non-compliance.

A mechanism for calculating the compliance fee will be changed yearly – with BIS currently accepting proposals to establish the fee for 2014. These be accepted until September 30, and a final decision will be made in the final quarter of the year.

Under the new system, it will be compulsory for all producers to join a producer compliance scheme, unless they fall below the de minimis threshold which exempts producers placing less than five tonnes onto the market per year.

Local authorities will also have greater freedom to choose WEEE streams that they would like to manage and treat directly, and will absorb any revenue or cost for handling the waste.

Changes to the system were not universally supported, with responses to the consultation on the proposals, which ran from April to June, split over whether wholesale changes needed to be carried out (see letsrecycle.com story).