The Joint Trade Association (JTA) has announced the outline for spending funds made available through the 2017 WEEE compliance fee mechanism.
The compliance fee was introduced into the UK Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) regulations in 2014. It is used to support the delivery of the regulations and provides a mechanism for compliance when a Producer Compliance Scheme (PCS) has insufficient evidence to meet their annual WEEE collection targets.
The compliance fee is determined after the end of each compliance year, and the methodologies used to determine the fee are set on a yearly basis.
The Joint Trade Association, a collection of electronics industry trade bodies, is overseeing the administration of the fund, and earlier this month announced that £8 million is being made available to support environmental projects from money that was collected through the 2017 WEEE Compliance Fee mechanism.
The JTA has said that it expects the funds to be spent on a range of activities over the next three years, including technical research, communications, behaviour change activities and local projects.
Submissions for projects will go before a panel for assessment and selection, which includes participants from Defra and the WEEE stakeholder community.
Two proposals for the 2018 UK WEEE compliance fee were put forward for consultation by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) last month.
Under the proposal by the JTA, fees would be stream-specific, which it said has the benefit of ensuring the costs to compliance schemes are reflective of the cost to collect WEEE. A non-linear escalator would be applied to WEEE streams depending on whether national collections were in deficit or surplus compared to the national target. Where a particular WEEE stream is in deficit, the escalator would be set so that there remained an incentive to collect but it would not be subject to a higher fee. A higher ‘surplus’ fee would be imposed where there is more WEEE available in a stream than the national target, since it would be more reasonable to expect a scheme to comply.
Under the Valpak proposal, compliance fees would be calculated separately for each scheme as well as for each WEEE stream. This would be based on the weighted average collection and treatment costs of all schemes using the fee, scheme operational management costs which would be avoided if these were not reflected in the fee and whether a scheme used the producer balancing scheme during the year. It would also take account of the degree to which national targets were missed and the scheme’s performance relative to its market share.
Both proposals have measures in place to ensure the producer compliance schemes that need to use the compliance fee but are not a member of the Producer Balancing System (PBS) must pay more.
Clarity’s WEEE compliance scheme provides its members with low cost and simple compliance, alongside unrivalled member support. If you would like to discuss compliance with the WEEE regulations, get in touch with a member of our team at weee@clarityenv.eu or on 0845 129 7177.
