Controlling the WEEE stream

LGE speaks to REPIC chief executive Dr Philip Morton about the latest changes to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) rules.

Last time LGE spoke to Repic’s Morton, around 18 months ago, the WEEE directive was a year old, and he was keen to highlight the teething troubles that were creating an obstacle to the efficiency of responses to the directive. Most markedly, said Morton, a number of Producer Compliance Schemes had over-contracted, collecting more than they could justifiably handle.

This in turn led to a situation where other, undersubscribed schemes were forced to buy waste products, or at least ‘evidence notes’ that the goods had been collected, from the over-subscribed ones in order to meet their obligations under the directive, often at inflated prices.

With councils now well into the third year of meeting their WEEE targets, we caught up with Morton again to see how things have moved on. Not to put too fine a point on it, the answer would appear to be “dramatically”. Morton takes up the story:

“Eventually, we were forced to take the Government to court for clarification under judicial review. We took BIS, the Environment Agency and SEPA to court on a number of points, one of which was that we consider that overcollection, where a scheme intentionally collects more than its share, is a breach of the WEEE regulations, and consequently a criminal offence. BIS, EA and SEPA agreed with us, as did the judge and as a result intentional over-collecting, as well as intentional under-collecting, are now illegal.”

The court case did have a knock on effect of delaying the planned amendments to the regulations which had originally been planned for the summer, however these amendments have now been put in place, and thanks to these every PCS now has to submit an annual operation plan, which must be adhered to. Morton expands: “With the new plans, the concepts of over or undercollecting are gone – the scheme has to be in balance. Prior to the review the whole system was out of balance. Now we have a system where schemes have to announce in advance how much WEEE they need, how much they will collect, and arrangements must be in place to collect on behalf of other schemes should a scheme access surplus , and also appoint other schemes to collect on your own behalf in the opposite situation.”

Morton concedes that the new situation may on the face of it look little different to before, but he is convinced that the new regulations will have the desired effect: “The beauty is that this turned the situation from a retrospective one, where PCSs could collect as much WEEE as they like then force other PCSs to buy the excess from you, to one where everything has to be arranged in advance. Basically if we can’t all agree on collection levels, we won’t get approval. Either we all get approved, or
none of us do.”

Perhaps to the surprise of the Environment Agency, Morton claims that the first approval process was a remarkably simple one, and all the PCSs are now operating in a much more efficient environment.

The new system also means that, from a local authorities point of view, there is much greater transparency with potential PCSs, and if a bidding PCS clearly has its full quota, the authority can now opt to use an alternative service. This in turn has led to closer relationships between authorities and their WEEE collection partners, with an increase in direct relationships, a fall in 3rd party collection, and consequently a decrease in WEEE leakage, and indeed money leakage.

REPIC is particularly keen to push direct relationships, and as an incentive to councils it has set aside a PR fund for its authority customers to use in order to publicise the requirements of the WEEE directive to the public. In Cheshire, meanwhile, in partnership with the local authority, it has placed a number of ‘bring banks’ around the county where residents can leave their smaller WEEE items, while in Leicestershire it co funded a scratch card promotion with WRAP which offered the chance of prizes to members of the public recycling their WEEE. In the wake of this particular promotion, WEEE recycling increased by 40 per cent, and REPIC is confident of maintaining these levels. The organisation hopes that these incentives will help it to grow its current share of the UK’s collection sites from its current 300 to 500, or around half of the country’s sites.

Morton concludes: “The main thing following the review is that there is now a lot more clarity for local authorities and they are now in possession of the relevant facts. The way the system was set up previously made it very hard for councils to make the right decision as they simply didn’t have access to enough information to do so. They can now make a conscious choice to deal directly with a PCS that needs the WEEE or with one that doesn’t and relies on third party funding. I think the WEEE legislation was probably some of the most complex environmental legislation we’ve ever had to put in place, so it’s understandable that there could be teething troubles. I think now we’re definitely heading in the right direction.”