Yes but under the directive the producer is the entity which brings the product into a MS. If the true manufacturer is outside the EU and has no legal entity within the MS then the obligation will fall upon whoever bought the product, be it the end user or an OEM who then integrates the item into their product.
As you say there may be differences in national implementations of WEEE and this is the very reason why the obligation is being placed on the MS based “producer” (importer/distributor), otherwise it would be difficult to comply. The EEC never considered distance/direct selling from outside the EU when they drew up the directive, probably because the root concern was to clean up on all the internal white and household goods which in the main are produced within the EU. Regards, Chris ____________ _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: 01 September 2005 20:21 To: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: Re: WEEE Process for US Mfr's Chris, 1) The stated intention of the WEEE Directive was to foster PRODUCER responsibility, not CUSTOMER responsibility - although all parties obviously have their part to play in protecting the environment in which we live. 2) You may be familiar with the idea that EU Directives are EU-wide law applied more or less consistently across all Member States - you can throw that notion out of the window for the WEEE Directive. Each Member State must have its own national legislation to implement the Directive (that's what Directives 'direct' MSs to do) but here we have a Directive that is almost anti-free movement in its effect. This is due to the variation in national legislation and the associated ways each country has chosen to implement requirements for producer registration etc. To give you another idea of the different approach here, for every other Directive I am aware of 'placing on the market' means placing on the market (e.g. offering for sale) in any MS within the EU: not so with WEEED, 'put on the market' means put on that particular country's market, so if you ship across the boarder from Northern Ireland (part of the UK) to Southern Ireland (Eire) you take it off the UK market (since you will no longer be recycling in that country and so will not want to pay the recycling charge) but put it on to the Eire market (where you will now be recycling it and so are liable for that country's - probably different - recycling charge). 3) There are a couple of pan-European compliance schemes I am aware of (one for lamps and the European Recycling Platform that has some large domestic appliance and PC manufacturers as members): there may be more such schemes. I do not know if even these schemes will operate in all 25 Member States. At a quick glance, the URL that Samuel Lifshutz provided some information about prospective compliance schemes in the UK, but as I have said there is much variation here and few one-stop-shops for the whole of Europe. {And I say 'prospective compliane shemes' because the UK is late in implimenting the Directive, so we have no national law that would cause compliance schemes to come into existance yet - we're still at the planning ahead stage whereas some countries have had laws in place for some time). Simple this isn't. Regards, Richard Hughes In a message dated 01/09/2005 18:03:00 GMT Standard Time, [email protected] writes: Hi All, We design telecom equipment in the US, it is manufactured by our CM's in China, and we sell it into Euorope through our internal sales force which does not have offices in Europe. Since our products are not sold to consumers, do we have to worry about setting up a recycling program to meet the WEEE directive? Currently, we are labeling our products with the Wheelie Bin and providing verbiage in our manual stating we are WEEE compliant. We believe that our end users/customers in Europe would be responsible for any Recycling process /program. Are we getting this right or do we need to contract with an EU authorized agent to setup a collection / recycling program for our equipment. Chris ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE Product Safety Engineering Society emc-pstc discussion list. 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