Anthony Sant, sales & marketing director of AO Recycling, which is linked to the online electricals retailer AO, issued the call at the WEEE Conference in London yesterday (21 June) which was organised by letsrecycle.com.
Also during the conference, delegates discussed the current WEEE (waste electrical and electronic equipment) market and demand for WEEE from local authority sites.
During his presentation, Mr Sant claimed that the fridge processing sector has suffered due to a lack of investment in plants, and suggested that a ratings system would encourage producers to pay more for processing and encourage investment in the sector.
He said: “Under the current operating system producers know that their end of life fridges are being processed but they don’t know to what standard.
“The lack of investment in UK’s fridge processing means there are simply not the plants to consistently deal with the number of fridges and, more importantly, to a standard that meets the high expectations of producers. At the moment there is no clear picture about who is doing a good job and who isn’t.”
Standards
Mr Sant also claimed that a ratings scheme would ‘raise standards’ among processors.
He said: “A ratings system would be one way that producers and their producer compliance schemes could be reassured that the processor they are using is delivering what they expect. It would help expose bad practice and push the industry to working to the highest possible recovery standards.
“For this to work, we need to be prepared to invest in new plants and upgrade existing. This can only be funded by producers committing to paying more for processing in return for the reassurance about quality and capacity.”
The conference also heard from Chris Chandler senior waste manager for Devon county council, who outlined some of the challenges in handling WEEE from a local authority perspective.
Demand
Mr Chandler claimed that since changes to the WEEE system, demand for WEEE from local authority civic amenity sites has dropped.
He explained that the council had been unable to secure a compliant bid when tendering a contract for the collection of WEEE from CA sites across Devon. Instead the council used ‘WEEE Regulation 34’ which in effect forces a compliance scheme to collect WEEE from the collection sites.
However, he claimed that this arrangement has given Devon council ‘less control’ over the collection of WEEE from its sites.
Mr Chandler said: “Local authorities aren’t feeling particularly loved in terms of the market, the overall market has gone from good to poor and the pendulum has swung from one end of the spectrum to the other. I think there needs to be a halfway house.
“WEEE is all about producer responsibility and we think that producers should bear all of the WEEE costs and that the current system does not reflect the true costs.”
Allocation
Also speaking during the conference, Mark Dempsey sustainability manager at IT manufacturer Hewlett Packard, who claimed that adopting an allocation system for producer WEEE obligations could provide a solution to a lack of demand for WEEE from councils.
He said: “Before 2015 we had very little linkage between producers and what was being collected by producer compliance schemes. What happened was that some compliance schemes collected lots of WEEE and others couldn’t get enough and there was an imbalance. The reforms of the UK system have gone some way to addressing that issue but I think we could go further.
“We can build on some of the good practice from Europe which uses a system of ‘matching’ – matching obligations of producers with the WEEE that is arising at local authorities and ensures that those local authorities get collection in a fair and equitable way.”
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