BERR issues WEEE evidence warning

The warning is an attempt by BERR – the Department for Business – to ensure that evidence of recycling of household WEEE is fully bought up and each scheme acquires sufficient to cover its obligation.

However, while BERR is keen to see everything work smoothly there remains the potential for some disparity in the purchase of evidence and the requirements of schemes. 

Household

Within the WEEE sector this disparity is seen as likely to involve the Repic compliance scheme and possibly some other schemes who cannot get evidence for particular WEEE categories – all schemes though have to obtain the appropriate evidence. Repic has a very large number of members including household names such as LG, Sanyo and Sharp but was not able to secure sufficient civic amenity sites as it needed to guarantee a supply of evidence because of strong competition from other schemes to get contracts with councils for their CA sites.

Dr Philip Morton, Repic chief executive, has emphasised that it the scheme does want to obtain sufficient evidence and that its members have environmental issues high on their agendas and desire to meet their obligations. He said: “As a buyer we have written to all producer compliance schemes to ask them what surplus they have by category. We sincerely hope all will be resolved – we are doing everything we can do.”

Allocation

Repic has expressed the view in the past that the regulations were brought in hastily (mainly because of tight deadlines and the prospect of an allocation system) and that an allocation scheme for civic amenity sites would have been preferable – this would have avoided the need for schemes to try and win over local authority support in a competitive way. And, the scheme is also understood to consider that the regulations required schemes to collect WEEE “to their members' needs.” In effect, this would mean that schemes should generally not collect more than they need and where they did this surplus should be made available for Repic to send to its contracted reprocessors and hence acquire the evidence.

However, an alternative reading of the regulations, suggested by one WEEE scheme, is that schemes are allowed to collect more WEEE as long as they collect for their members' needs.

Despite BERR's comments, an impasse could still be possible as Repic had been keen to organise its own WEEE reprocessing route and considers it should have had access to more sites than it had achieved. This is because it feels it has been able to negotiate competitive costs for handling and reprocessing of WEEE and so is wary of additional costs that might be included in the price of some evidence. Nevertheless, Repic has worked successfully with more than 100 sites, including local authorities such as Norfolk, the Scilly Isles and Pembrokeshire and is also trading with many other schemes to obtain evidence and is thought to have more evidence than other schemes.

Concern

In its statement today BERR said that some schemes ” have expressed concern about inappropriately high evidence prices, and have called for intervention from BERR and/or the environment agencies.”

The Department continued: ” The price of evidence schemes wish to trade is a commercial matter and not one that BERR or the environment agencies can be directly involved in setting.  In view of the concerns raised, however, we would like to take this opportunity to remind schemes that the obligation to finance the costs of WEEE collection, treatment and disposal, means that the price of evidence should be in line with the costs incurred by the selling scheme, provided those costs are legitimate producer responsibility costs. 

Settlement Centre

“Several schemes have raised concerns that there is not enough appropriate evidence available via the Settlement Centre to enable them to meet their collection obligations.  This is because not all schemes are using the Settlement Centre facility to advertise evidence for sale, and not because of any evidence shortfall.  As we near the trading deadline for 2007 we would encourage schemes, both buying and selling evidence, to make full use of the Settlement Centre trade request facility to assist in trading.” 

The statement added: “The decision to base final obligations on the amount of evidence in the Settlement Centre means that every scheme can comply in every category. The environment agencies are prepared to take vigorous enforcement action against any scheme which fails to meet the obligations of their members.  We expect all compliance schemes fully to discharge these obligations.  As final collection obligations exactly equal the amount of evidence available in the Settlement Centre, the Secretary of State has no plans to  buy any surplus evidence.”