British Retail Consortium to form WEEE compliance scheme

Under forthcoming UK regulations resulting from the European Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) Directive, retailers will be obliged to offer in-store take-back of old electronic products or join a retailer compliance scheme which would offer alternative take-back arrangements.

This compliance scheme is likely to provide about 5 million each year from 2005-10 to upgrade local authority civic amenity sites to collect WEEE. This money is likely to be made available for councils to obtain through a bidding process.

” The government has made it clear it would like to see retailers setting up a compliance scheme. “
– Nigel Smith, BRC CSR director
The combined total cost of CA site upgrades and the compliance scheme's other take-back activities is not expected to exceed 10 million a year.

Unlike the electrical producers, who will set up competing compliance schemes – and have already set up two (see letsrecycle.com WEEE section) – the retailers are only likely to have one compliance scheme.

The BRC, the retailers' trade association, is now asking interested companies to outline the level of data acquisition they would need to reflect the differences in collection costs for the ten categories of WEEE, how to allocate costs through market share and in turn calculate compliance costs for scheme members.

Speaking to letsrecycle.com, the BRC's corporate social responsibility policy director Nigel Smith said: “The government has made it clear it would like to see retailers setting up a compliance scheme to make alternative take-back arrangements, and in the last week or two we have compiled an expression of interest note to find a partner organisation to run the scheme. This is likely to cost about 10 million a year.”

Interest
Mr Smith said the BRC had already received some interest from organisations such as Valpak, the UK's largest packaging waste compliance scheme.

Interested organisations will have to recommend a mix of collection options, interpreting the “adequate geographical coverage” demand by the WEEE regulations for a national collection network.

The BRC has set a deadline of February 20, 2004 for those interested in running its retailers' compliance scheme to express their interest.