The WEEE review began last summer and is expected to conclude next year with proposals to revise the legislation. The Commission invited input, and they're getting it.

Manufacturers are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their traditional adversaries to impact the review. Companies including Samsung, Acer and Motorola have joined forces with organizations such as Friends of the Earth Europe and Greenpeace to write a complaint about what they see as the directive's key implementation failure — not promoting eco-design.

Iza Kruszewska, a Greenpeace International toxics campaigner based in London, said the eco-design failure lies in a misunderstanding that needs to be clarified.

According to WEEE, historical waste — all the old electronics that was around before the August 13, 2005 WEEE deadline — is a collective responsibility. Manufacturers pay for recycling all the old waste, regardless of brand, according to their current market share.

But future waste, electronics put on the market after the deadline, is the responsibility of each individual producer, in line with the Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR) principle the WEEE directive calls for. The idea is to motivate companies to compete on design innovations for easier and cheaper recycling.

Sounds clear enough, but when WEEE was handed down from Brussels to be written into the laws of each of the 27 member states, only 11 countries spelled out the distinction between historical and future waste, Kruszewska said.

"The danger is that the states will go on forever with collective responsibility," she said. "Then manufacturers who make changes to products to improve recyclability will not be rewarded."

IPR is a hot issue that is uniting many groups. But makers of large household goods are lobbying hard against it because their appliances are designed to last more than a decade, said Hans Jochen Lueckefett, managing director of 1WEEE Services (Boeblingen, Germany), a pan-European compliance scheme. "They're saying it's ridiculous to make a design-for-recyclability investment when ROI is more than ten years away," Lueckefett said. "Most countries have followed their argumentation."

Eco-design of course is mandated by the imminent Energy using Products (EuP) directive, expected to launch in August. But the EuP targets design for energy efficiency and not recyclability, Kruszewska added.

Registration causes additional headaches

Moving beyond IPR, other implementation problems stem from the mish-mash of registration procedures across the EU.

Viktor Sundberg, vice president of environmental and European Affairs for Electrolux in Brussels, cited the inefficiencies in dealing with national registration bodies, which add time and money.

Companies need to register in each member state the quantity of products they put on the market. But the registry and format varies by country. Some ask to define quantity by categories of equipment, others by volume or weight. Layered on top of these varying requirements are language and bureaucratic differences.

In addition, when waste moves between countries, responsibility for recycling changes. "These registration bodies need to talk to each other and compare data, but they can't because the [process] is not the same in each country," Sundberg said.

Recycling costs also vary widely by country, said Christof Delatter, coordinator at the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities in Brussels, which works with a network known as ACR+ that is addressing the "confusing and inconsistent" WEEE implementation.

According to Delatter's statistics, recycling a digital camera in Switzerland costs 1 euro. In Germany, recycling the same camera costs 1 euro cent. "The difference is a factor of 100 and has nothing to do with the efficiency of the operation," Delatter said. "In Germany, local infrastructure has to be paid by municipalities, which in our opinion is not compliant with the directive."

In some countries, such subsidies are hidden, Delatter added. "You don't really know how much money goes from local and central authorities into these takeback systems and that makes it very difficult to compare efficiency of the different systems."

Compliance schemes themselves also want WEEE revisions. Hans Korfmacher, president of the European Recycling Platform, a pan-European WEEE compliance scheme founded by manufacturers, said the unharmonized procedures extend to the permit process for compliance schemes.

Germany, for example, has one central agency and a simple permit procedure. In Spain, a WEEE services company has to fill out a stack of paperwork for each of the 19 regions and wait for all the approvals. "[The bureaucracy] is blocking competition between compliance schemes," Korfmacher said.

The bureaucratic burden also translates into additional costs. ERP's recycling costs for a laptop in Spain, for example, are about four times higher than in countries with the most efficient permit procedures, he said.

Other WEEE issues
Moreover, recyclers are not monitored properly, Korfmacher said. For example, some countries allow recyclers to shred refrigerators, a cost-effective method that is not allowed due to the release of toxins. ERP doesn't use the method and is put at a cost disadvantage against others that are allowed to shred refrigerators in certain states. "Authorities are not enforcing the right technical treatment of WEEE."

The European Union's Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive is also causing some issues. The two directives it turns out have links that create trouble, something that is happening now in Germany, said Matthias Lang, a regulatory lawyer at Arqis Rechtsanwalte (Dusseldorf, Germany).

On paper, RoHS refers to the WEEE directive for the list of the 10 product categories in its scope. RoHS categories are important. For example, manufacturers with products in Categories 8 and 9 are exempt from RoHS, sometimes after costly research and legal wrangling.

With WEEE, the product categories are not that big of a deal. WEEE registration officials can be less precise and classify a Category 8 or 9 product as, say, Category 3. "On the WEEE side, I could live with the classification," said Lang, who has such a case now. "But the classification becomes legally binding and now I have an official decision against my interest on the RoHS side. I have to fight the whole thing all over again."

Then there's enforcement or lack of enforcement. Vetting structures haven't crystallized, but a few countries have mechanisms that address free riders. For example, Hungary taxes producers who don't register or don't meet recycling targets. In Germany, a producer gets a registration number only after going through the WEEE registration process. Without the number, retailers can't sell their products.

But no WEEE police exist and no pan-European cooperation like that being developed by RoHS authorities is in the works. Enforcement is more sluggish than RoHS for several reasons. RoHS is a product directive that presents a clear pass/fail scenario, explained 1WEEE's Lueckefett. WEEE is waste-related, meaning layers of government have responsibilities intertwined with producers.

More importantly, some fundamental issues are still challenged in court, such as the definition of "fixed installations," Arqis' Lang said. Authorities do not have clear cut cases to go after.

Ireland has the distinction of having the only WEEE-related prosecution when it fined retailer Boots Pharmacy in 2005 for not displaying recycling costs added to the product price.

That may change. In Belgium — which has had six years of takeback and recycling experience — officials are now drawing up legal cases against producers who don't comply, according to Delatter. "It is possible that authorities might start actions in court against producers and importers this year."

Belgium's recycling experience has provided time for the various government bodies to know how to work together effectively. It also has clear cut language that says the "producer" is the one who puts the product on the market, period.

In other countries, the distinction between producer and importer is fuzzy, complicating enforcement efforts, Delatter said. A company that doesn't register simply may not believe it is a producer, and may be right.

Like it or not, Europe is stuck with WEEE, as is, for a while. Electrolux's Sundberg estimates that it will be several years before the review can potentially result in written changes in each member state.

What revisions are needed? Many will agree that the following changes need to be made in order to have cost-effective and uniform requirements across all member states.

• Distinction between historical and future waste clearly defined by all member states to promote eco-design
• Harmonized registration and reporting requirements
• Harmonized and efficient procedures for WEEE compliance service permits
• Clear and uniform definition of "producer"
• Clarification of scope issues such as "fixed installation"
• More flexibility with the 4 kg of WEEE per inhabitant per year recycling target to reflect the different recycling experience of member states
• Ensure governments audit and monitor national recycling companies -
• Clarification of the link between WEEE and RoHS and the importance of product classification
• Enforcement methods and practices

Additional resources:

"Lost in Transposition?" a study of the implementation of Individual Producer Responsibility in the WEEE Directive.

Link to WEEE 2007 position paper.