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Manufacturers call for individual responsibility in UK WEEE legislation

Electronics manufacturers Sony and Electrolux have called for the government to centre their implementation of the European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive around a system of individual responsibility.

The European Directive, which has just come to the end of a conciliatory stage and is expected to be enshrined in European law in Spring 2003, allows for EU member states to implement the regulations by placing responsibility on individual manufacturers or collective groups of companies.

But speaking at a meeting of the Associate Parliamentary Sustainable Waste Group, Sony's Bill Vestey and Electrolux's Henrick Sundstrom said that a collective system of financial responsibility for waste electronics would not drive environmental design.

“We have strong support for individual producer responsibility,” said Mr Vestey, general manager of public affairs at Sony UK. “It would be a catalyst for environmental design and we would ask the government to include this in the way they transpose the Directive into UK law. It would also act against so-called free riders.”

The meeting, in the Palace at Westminster, was attended by representatives from the waste management industry, compliance schemes, materials reprocessors, electrical retailers and manufacturers, the Environment Agency, local authorities, the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the European Union.

Shared
Henrick Sundstrom, vice president of environmental affairs at Electrolux, explained that if companies are part of a collective responsibility, any investment they put in to minimise waste or strengthen collection and treatment infrastructure would be shared by the entire collective group.

Therefore, he said, one company might put in a large investment and find that other companies do not do likewise, but benefit from that large investment. This, he said, would mean companies would be unlikely to put in large investments to the system, preferring to put in as little as possible.

Benefits
However, with individual responsibility, improvements would be market-driven, with each company seeing the benefits of their own investment.

He said: “With a market-driven, individual responsibility system prices reflect the true costs, including environmental impacts, and manufacturers could derive competitive advantage in eco-design.”

In any such system, responsibility for historical waste – defined as that put on the market before 2005 – would have to be dealt with by a “visible fee”, according to both Sony and Electrolux. Since many companies whose products are in use in the UK have gone out of business, collective or individual responsibility would see no company or collective responsible for a sizable number of WEEE items.

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