Five ways ecosurety represents producers for policy and regulatory change

Here are a five examples of how, in WEEE compliance alone, we are currently representing our members’ interests at policy level:

1. Government agreement for substantiated estimates

With the UK targeted to meet a 65% WEEE recycling rate by 2019, we have been working to ensure that waste electricals treated outside of the WEEE system are taken into account when the Government sets targets. This has been agreed by the Government and now means that Business to Consumer (B2C) producers will benefit as although targets will increase, they will be subsidised, reducing the amount of WEEE that B2C producers will otherwise have to finance.

2. Deduction of EEE exports from reporting

If you are exporting EEE, why should you have to finance the equivalent recycling costs of it ending up in the UK waste stream? We addressed this common question by asking our members the different scenarios where they would export, feeding this back into a consultation group. The result: producers now, in 2015, are able to remove exported EEE from their quarterly reporting.

3. Representing producers’ interests in change to registration fees

The Environment Agency will be reviewing their producer registration fees (among other fees) in September 2015. This will affect our members and so we will be requesting feedback on any proposed changes in due course.

4. Defending against increased financial changes

The categorisation of EEE is due to change in 2019 as the regulations move to open scoping. This change is effectively reducing the categories producers report into from 14 categories to six. We anticipate that this reduction will have a negative financial impact on producers in particular categories and as such have lobbied to keep the original 14. Preliminary feedback from policy makers is positive and we are endeavouring to reach formal agreement soon.

5. Individual scoping queries

Since dual use has changed how historic non-household products are now classified as household products, we have encountered instances where some producers’ products fall into a grey area. We have worked with producers and the Environment Agencies to support classification of products as non-household where it would be unfair to classify otherwise.

 

ecosurety welcomes all producers of EEE to provide feedback on any of the consultations underway with policy makers and will even provide support in the lobbying process if you have individual scoping or interpretation concerns.

Please feel free to contact our WEEE compliance specialists on 0845 094 2228 if you have any feedback to give.

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