Producers should pay for WEEE collection, says LGA

The Local Government Association has called for producers to be made responsible for funding kerbside waste electrical and electronic equipment collection under the recast WEEE Directive, ahead of a key European Parliament vote on the legislation this week.

 

While retailers in the UK do support the costs of operating a collection network, only a fraction of the small appliances discarded each year are recycled

 
Cllr  Gary Porter, chair of LGA environment board

The council representative body, known as the LGA, said that the change would help the UK to reach the higher WEEE collection targets proposed by the recast process, by improving on the 14% of small WEEE that was collected for recycling in 2010.

And, as a result it said it would help the UK avoid the fines of up to €350,000 (£298,880) a day it claimed could be levied on EU member states that missed the goals.

Currently, producers are only responsible for funding the collection, treatment and recycling of WEEE from designated collection facilities, which tend to be council civic amenity sites, and there are few direct collections of WEEE from households.

Proposals for this to be extended by encouraging producers financially responsible for kerbside WEEE collections were included in the original WEEE Directive recast plans published by the European Commission.

These appeared to have been were dropped when the recast reached the European Parliament's environment committee last year (see letsrecycle.com).

But, they were endorsed in the final report backed by the Committee in June 2010 (see letsrecycle.com story), which said that, under the 'polluter pays' principle, governments should be able raise money from producers to pay for the cost of collection from households. 

“Beefed up”

And, this was approach was endorsed today by the LGA, which said the original proposals to ‘encourage' producers to fund separate collection from households needed to be “beefed up” when the recast is voted on by a full plenary session of the Parliament for the first time on Thursday (February 3).

Councillor Gary Porter, chair of the LGA environment board, said: “While retailers in the UK do support the costs of operating a collection network, only a fraction of the small appliances discarded each year are recycled. We think producers have a responsibility to do more.”

“We want EU laws beefed up to ensure that councils which want to offer household collection of small waste electronics can reclaim the cost from the producers who profit from them.”

The LGA claims that kerbside collections could be introduced where “locally appropriate”, with the cuts being made to council budgets making it difficult for them to afford to introduce the service themselves.

Issues

Among the other key issues under consideration at Thursday's meeting are replacing the current weight-based WEEE collection goals, which the UK has easily achieved in previous years, with a percentage-based system, with Mr Florenz proposing a target for 85% of WEEE generated to be collected by 2016 (see letsrecycle.com story).

This would appear to be a less taxing prospect for the UK than achieving the European Commission's original proposals for a 65% goal calculated according to the amount of electrical equipment placed on the market – plans which have attracted concern across Europe (see letsrecycle.com story).

Among the other measures set to be voted on by the Parliament are:

• A “simpler” system of six categories of WEEE, replacing the current 10, with goals for between 70% and 85% of WEEE to be recovered and between 50% and 75% to be recycled, depending on category;
• A call for reusable equipment to be kept separate from other electronic waste, and for a 5% reuse target to apply to certain categories of equipment
• Tougher inspections on exported waste to ensure only reusable equipment is sent to developing countries;
• Creating an obligation for retailers to accept small WEEE that is handed into them.