Shaping WEEE in the UK

ERP provides overview of consultation

7 February 2024

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.