Rubbish Return
Darren,
Small businesses have to read and understand the regulations which are 70 pages long, amendments add another 12 to that total. You, within what is obviously a large business, only need to be able to understand what weee is and tell your customers what to do with it. Telling customers to take it to the civic amenity site means your company has joined the DTS takeback scheme operated exclusively by Valpak. Your company should have a registration number in regard to this, plenty of leaflets around the store and trained staff able to understand and promote recycling. The minimum fee is £1500 for a small business to register with Valpak. £1500 cost on EEE sales of £100,000 (which may be 25% of total turnover) in that context is highly significant. Your company's Valpak membership fee will be based on items (rather than fixed fee) which returns a fraction of the 1.5% cost per £100,000 of EEE turnover endured by small business. Beyond that there is much more to WEEE that you personally do not have to deal with. Building computers to customer specification can add some £30 of Weee costs to each build; for multi-national producers this added cost can be less that £5. Getting the picture?
Nevertheless, BERR and the EC are seriously looking at WEEE again and there is a recognition of current disproportionate cost and anti-competitive implementation. Now is the time to tallk and be persuasive within the current BERR WEEE consultation phase. I fear another campaign as mentioned above will simply alienate Itacs from this process. Smaller IT businesses have a voice this time unlike pre-implementation. We should be using it this time through the consultation process, something no-one did on our behalf pre-implementation. Itacs hadn't been formed at that time.
John, you hit the nail on the head better than I.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
