A WEEE warning

The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Regulations 2006 are upon us, and they’ve managed to create a flurry of confusion for contractors.

The aim of the regulations is to encourage the recycling of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE). The cost of recycling is borne in part by the distributor, ie the retailer or wholesaler, and the producer, who is usually the manufacturer and not the consumer. This appears to be mere semantics as these costs will obviously be built into the price of the product.

There has been concern, however, that an installer might be deemed a distributor. Nowhere in the DTI’s guidance notes is this suggested. Indeed, the installer is barely mentioned.

There were concerns that control panels might be subject to the regulations and so bring the installer into the category of producer. The widely held view is that this is not the case and it is only the qualifying components within a control panel that will be categorised as WEEE. However, installers should still be wary about branding composite equipment that they assemble to ensure they will not get caught under the WEEE regulations as a producer.

The definition of a producer is more complex than might be expected and essentially includes organisations who:

• manufacture EEE under their own brands;
• sell EEE that has been manufactured by other companies under their own brands in the UK;
• import EEE and introduce this to the UK market (including from the Republic of Ireland);
• sell EEE by distance in another European member state.

Producers have to be a member of a Producer Compliance Scheme and contribute to the funding of recycling WEEE. The intention of the Directive, and so the regulations, is that producers take financial responsibility for the environmental impact of products they place on the market, especially when those products become waste.

The products and equipment included have been scheduled out in some detail:

• large household appliances;
• small household appliances;
• IT and telecommunications equipment;
• consumer equipment;
• lighting equipment including electric light bulbs and household luminaires;
• electrical and electronic tools (with the exception of large scale stationary industrial tools);
• toys, leisure and sports equipment;
• medical devices (with the exception of all implanted and infected products);
• monitoring and control instruments (smoke detectors, heating regulators and components in control panels);
• automatic dispensers.

The legislation is largely aimed at the domestic consumer who has the right to return an appliance, for example a washing machine, to a retailer when replacing it. The retailer has to take the old machine back and arrange for its collection under a scheme funded by producers, who in turn have a responsibility for the recycling process.

Important features of the regulations include:

• they are not mandatory on the consumer, who has no legal obligation to return WEEE to a distributor;
• there is no right of free collection by the distributor from the consumer, and so the distributor can charge for this service;
• WEEE does not include cabling or containment.

Where WEEE is removed as part of a commercial contract, the contracting parties are free to make their own commercial arrangements.

The DTI has found the transposition of the WEEE Directive into UK legislation a challenging task. Directives are drafted flexibly, so requirements can be incorporated into each member state’s domestic legislation. This is why different countries can end up with different legal requirements. WEEE is no exception.

The DTI’s comprehensive set of guidance notes can be found at www.dti.gov.uk under WEEE Guidance. The notes are not definitive and will be updated over time. As with any legislation, it is the courts who will ultimately decide how the regulations should be interpreted.