"Financial guarantees" in respect of household WEEE
The WEEE Directive places an obligation on producers to finance the costs of collection, treatment, recovery and environmentally sound disposal of separately collected WEEE allocated to them by the National Clearing House (NCH).
The WEEE Directive requires financial guarantees to ensure the costs of future WEEE arisings from new products are met and has provisions for allowing producers to show, for a transitional period, at the point of sale to consumers, the costs of collection and recovery of old products when selling new equipment.
When producers register with the NCH, they are effectively undertaking to pay to fund their share of arisings of separately collected WEEE in each compliance period.
The Government is implementing the WEEE Directive’s provisions on financing separately collected WEEE on the basis of what is essentially a market share approach, in which producers are allocated their “WEEE shares”. Within this, there is flexibility for producers to discharge their obligations independently by arranging collection, treatment and recovery of
WEEE from their own or others’ products; or collectively; or by joining a compliance scheme.
Obligations on the financing of business WEEE
The WEEE Regulations place obligations on producers selling to business customers, and on business end-users, to take responsibility for the costs of collection, treatment, recovery and environmentally sound disposal of WEEE. The responsibility is to report evidence showing treatment of WEEE at authorised treatment facilities (ATFs), and also evidence to show this WEEE has been recovered and reused/recycled according to the WEEE Directive’s recovery and recycling/reuse targets for the relevant product category or categories.
The WEEE Regulations require that a producer who supplies new equipment to a business user to replace original equipment purchased before 13 August 2005 must finance the costs of treatment, recovery and sound disposal of the replaced equipment (whether or not they supplied this original equipment). If the business user is not making a like-for-like replacement purchase then the business user is responsible for financing collection, treatment, recovery and environmentally responsible end disposal of any equipment they discards if they bought the equipment prior to 13 August 2005.
For waste resulting from new products sold after 13 August 2005, the WEEE Regulations provide for there to be an obligation on the producer. But, the producer and the business user can freely negotiate to reach agreement on how to allocate the responsibility for the financing of collection, treatment, recovery and environmentally sound disposal of the “future” WEEE.
The WEEE Regulations set a framework in which the allocation of responsibility for WEEE end-of-life management can become a factor in commercial transactions during the sale of electrical and electronic equipment in the future.