The EEB – which includes the National Trust, RSPB and WWF among its members – said that the Parliament should have followed its Environment Committee in insisting on strong recycling targets in yesterday's vote on the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive. The Bureau added: “This failure opens the door for some 15-20% of some equipment such as televisions, computers and phones to be incinerated. The European Parliament has also failed to include all the spare parts and consumables, in particular, light bulbs.”
But on the whole, the EEB welcomed yesterday's vote and said that Parliament has “considerably improved the Council Common Position, especially with respect to individual producer responsibility”. The Parliament unanimously supported (525 votes to 2) the individual financing of future WEEE.
EEB's secretary general John Hontelez said: “This is an important victory in environmental legislation; making companies responsible individually for the treatment of their products once they are no longer used is an essential incentive for minimising environmental impacts by improving the environmental characteristics of these products.”
The EEB also welcomed the amendment that requires Member States to collect all WEEE separately from other household waste. And Parliament voted to improve information for users about the new rules and they will require products to be marked to show that they must not be binned.
But although Member States will have to arrange “sufficient enforcement capacities” it is not clear what this means. This is because Parliament did not adopt the Environment Committee's proposed amendment which could have seen consumers fined for failing to sort their waste. Instead, Parliament said that Member States must “ensure that consumers participate in the collection of WEEE and encourage them to facilitate the process of re-use, treatment and recovery”. But the question has been raised as to how states can “ensure” participation
without sanctions.
To resolve the problem of imported products distorting the market, MEPs said that, where necessary, customs services should be empowered to add a charge to VAT and/or customs duty when goods enter the EU. Strasbourg also wants ozone-depleting gases to be removed from all equipment containing them, not just refrigerators and freezers. And these and some of the other amendments are likely to lead to a complex series of “conciliation” negotiations between Parliament and the Council of Ministers before the directive can be agreed. This conciliation process is limited to six months.
Register for free to comment