WEEE

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)

The 2006 WEEE Regulations were initially brought in to reduce the amount of household waste. However, they have had a major impact on business too.

If you produce, distribute or use waste electrical and electronic equipment you must adhere to the new legislation. Examples of business-related goods which this legislation applies to include:

• Heating, lighting and cooling equipment
• Tools
• IT and audio visual equipment
• Medical devices
• Automatic dispensers
• Monitoring and control instruments

WEEE must be stored, collected, treated, reused, recovered or disposed of separately from any of your other business waste.

You must also obtain and keep proof that it was given to an authorised waste-management company, such as Niramax, and was dealt with in an environmentally sound way.

We collect a variety of electrical equipment, such as refrigerators and monitors, which are now categorised as ‘hazardous waste.’ We take these items to licensed re-processing facilities, so that all of the recoverable material can be recycled.

It is unlikely that you will have to pay for the treatment and recycling costs of WEEE as this falls to producers if WEEE products were produced after 2005. Any equipment which was produced before this date may incur a collection and treatment cost.

All we ask is that your WEEE products are separately stored for collection.

This enables safe storage and collection without effecting the environment. However, you need to know that:

• The new hazardous waste regulations state that if you produce more than 500kg of WEEE per annum, you need to register your site as a hazardous waste producer
• We can register your site with the Environment Agency and provide you with a premises code for producing hazardous waste, for a small fee
• Sites that produce WEEE material have to be registered to complete consignment notes correctly to make sure that our duty of care is effectively carried out.