Over the last couple of years we’ve donated around £2,000 in order to be Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) registered.
In the same period how much toxic electrical waste have we saved from landfill? None. Not a single solitary chip or board.
Why don’t we all just admit it: WEEE is just another tax and a dumb tax at that.
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We pay about £450 a year to be registered and all that has changed since we registered is that we have added some stickers to our products, we have to waste time working out quarterly weights shipped (which is less than 200kg!), and that we are £450 worse off. Which we will have to recoup by selling and shipping more EEE, of course.
The enivronment has gained nothing other than a several hundred plastic stickers a year extra being manufactured and consumed. Our products practically never get thrown away, they are either repaired in the rare event they ever fail, or they are sold or passed on again and again.
The business environment has gained a new layer of bean-counting bureaucracy, more wasted time and paperwork, and a large number of third-party “solution providers”, yipee.
WEEE is a tax and a clumsy, energy and effort wasting one at that. I would not be surprised to learn that the net effect on the environment of this legislation is a negative one if the detailed total impact of implementation is taken into account.
There seems to be an underlying philosophy in government that counting things differently changes the thing you’re counting in some fundamental way (see carbon offsetting et al) which of course it doesn’t.
@John – and so say all of us!
As a follow up, now we find that certain WEEE compliance schemes get you on board at a certain price for the first year then when the Environment Agency wants its fees for the coming year in advance in September, without warning, they up the membership for the second year by nearly a huge amount. And they want the membership paying 3 months in advance too.
It appears that anyone who’s a member of a WEEE scheme can avoid paying any fees in September by cancelling their automatic re-registration for the following year at the beginning of each year (i.e. soon after registering), the re-registering again near the end of December.
I can see nothing in the rules preventing this at present, if anyone has any experience of doing this, please post it! I’m sure the practice will be unpopular with those scheme providers who bill upfront for membership, and also with the EA who will have to do lots of monitoring of de- and re- registering.
I believe the EA have created an easy opportunity for sharp practice by scheme providers by requiring early re-registration of existing members.
I think the WEEE Directive should be promoted to become more prominent in the public eye. It is a worthwhile concept. I am a big supporter of the whole WEEE idea, I think it’s a good way of raising awareness and that there’s a lot of logic behind it. They simply need to develop it further.
Rachel
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