UK: WEEE Shaping

At the end of 2023, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) launched the long-awaited consultation on the UK’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Regulations 2013. The closing date for responses is 7 March 2024.

The UK’s WEEE recycling rate is only 57%, and around 450,000 tonnes of WEEE is disposed of through residual streams.

The UK government wants to see more WEEE reused and recycled by making it easier for households and others to access a collection.

The proposed changes will increase the costs of complying with the Regulations to producers and other organisations, and require some additional data reporting.

The consultation focuses on specific reforms, including:

• Increasing collections of WEEE from households
• Increasing the distributor collections infrastructure for WEEE
• Introducing new producer obligations for online marketplaces and fulfilment houses
• Dealing with the environmental impacts of vaping products, and
• System governance, the creation of a WEEE Scheme Administrator and performance indicators

The consultation is also calling for evidence and views to support additional, longer-term changes under consideration, including:

• Full net cost recovery
• Allocation of costs for the collection and treatment of household WEEE
• Prevention of waste and increasing reuse of unwanted electrical and electronic equipment
• Moving to a circular economy through the design of better products and business models
• Increasing collections of business WEEE, and
• Improving treatment standards

The proposals are accompanied by an Impact Assessment.

The first changes could be put into legislation in 2024 and implemented in 2025.

This article is taken from a longer post by Landbell Group company, ERP UK. You can read the full text here.

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