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Consumers should not pay for recycling old WEEE, says HP

Hewlett Packard has said consumers should not end up paying for recycling electrical goods under producer responsibility legislation, writes Caroline Morley.

The electronics manufacturer has said it will not support the mandatory 'visible fee' idea put forward by the government as one of the options to fund the recycling of existing goods. Under this approach, consumers buying new equipment would be charged an up-front fee for the recycling of WEEE already in the marketplace.

Instead, HP says producers should be financially responsible as this lies at the heart of the European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive.

However, the WEEE Directive does allow producers to &#39de;monstrate' to consumers the cost of collecting and recycling electrical goods for up to ten years. And use of such a 'visible fee' has strong support from small household goods manufacturers in the UK but not retailers or the larger computer and IT manufacturers, such as HP.

Dr Kirstie McIntyre, HP WEEE Programme Manager for the UK, told letsrecycle.com: “This is a piece of producer responsibility legislation, we do not feel it is right to pass it on to the consumer. Obviously there will be some movement on prices but it would be considerably less if HP was in control of it.

“Hewlett Packard is quite particular on this point; we are very anti the use of the visible fee as a financing mechanism,” she added.

Dr McIntyre said she was disappointed that the importance of visible fees was not properly explored in the DTI's most recent consultation paper on WEEE Directive, which closed yesterday (March 1).

Incentive

The biggest problem with visible fees was that a standardised charge would not provide an incentive to reduce the environmental impact of electronics, Dr McIntyre said.

“People are suggesting that visible fees should be a flat fee – so every computer would have the same fee – because that is seen as fair and otherwise it would be difficult for retailers to administer. But if it is flat there will be no optimising of costs,” she warned.

Dr McIntyre explained that in other European countries, such as the Netherlands and Norway, where a visible fee is already used the schemes have come up against several problems. These included confusion amongst consumers over what they are paying for and the complexity of the administration system.

And, in some European countries, the funds paid by consumers through visible fees have been vastly under-spent by up to hundreds of millions of euros because of over-estimates, she said.

  • The WEEE Directive is due to be implemented in the UK by August 2004 and sets targets for the recycling and collection of electrical goods, including a 65% recycling target for IT and communications equipment by December 31, 2006.

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