Minister sees Clearing House as “attractive” for WEEE

The minister was speaking at a meeting of the Associate Parliamentary Sustainable Waste Group on Wednesday, outlining his initial thoughts following the close of the DTI's second consultation on new waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) regulations.

” The idea of a clearing house would be attractive to provide a one stop shop collection service.“
– trade minister Stephen Timms
A Clearing House has been put forward as a preferred option by the government, and would provide the link between collection points – such as local authority civic amenity sites – and WEEE recyclers. It would also administer data to show that producers are carrying out their financial responsibility for their obligation of the recycling.

Mr Timms told a cross-sector audience: “The idea of a clearing house would be attractive to provide a one stop shop collection service. Producers would pay for the service and the clearing house would administer data flow between producers, recyclers and local authorities.

“The Clearing House has canvassed wide support from other groups so we will be looking at the concept closely. But, there is a lot of detail still to be considered,” he added.

Back-up
Mr Timms suggested that for the most part, producers would be organising their obligations, and the Clearing House ought to be a “back-up” system for collection points to call when WEEE needs to be taken away for recycling. The minister said he thought a Clearing House would require minimal costs, with about six to 10 employees.

However, speaking to letsrecycle.com after the meeting, WEEE stakeholders, including manufacturers, said the Clearing House would need to be much larger than the minister was suggesting, with important responsibilities. This would include fairly allocating the collection points – so that no compliance scheme or producer could “tap up” the more lucrative sites, those with more WEEE arising.

Chris Tollady of the DTI's sustainable development unit, said that the government would issue an analysis of its second consultation soon, and that the third consultation – the release of draft regulations – would be put out in May.

Stephen Timms said the government was still on track to implement the regulations by the European deadline of August 2004, although he admitted it would be a “challenging” deadline.