Do WEEE understand?
22 June 2007
No WEEE do not, in many cases would be my impression. And the reasons we are not are either that WEEE is not understood, or that it is not taken seriously. Either way, if the regulations are not adhered to then the company could be penalised and the products taken off the market.
I spoke to a manufacturer of industrial electrical goods the week before last, which proudly claimed that his products were WEEE/RoHS compliant. The problem here was two fold. Firstly was the casual labelling of the products as compliant, and the second was the lack of understanding about what WEEE is.
While I strongly suspect that there is a sizeable minority of companies who are still not RoHS compliant (when they should be), at least everyone knows what is involved. You use lead-free solders and your capacitors do not contain too much of any of the other banned substances. From a concept point of view, manufacturing within RoHS is therefore easy. But RoHS is just a subset of WEEE and being RoHS compliant does not mean being WEEE compliant. When I asked the electrical manufacturer about his product being ‘WEEE-compliant’ he said that they had a fully lead-free process. When I suggested that WEEE is not something that a product complies to but is actually more to do with the company and its systems, he looked at me blankly. I’ve taken the lead-out – job done, was his attitude. On further questioning it was clear that there were no systems in place, or agreements with third party waste managers, for taking back equipment at end of life (and some of the equipment was sold direct), and also no agreements with the principal resellers for the products sold through distribution. With the delayed legislation coming into effect in a matter of weeks (in Europe), this company and many like it will not be in a position to say that it complies with WEEE.
And this is a major manufacturer within Europe. Despite the global emergence of variations of WEEE and RoHS, companies from outside Europe are unlikely to look in and take our rules all that seriously. Are governments going to come down hard on their major manufacturers while neighbouring governments are more lenient with theirs. Of course not. So companies from outside the region will see a sprawling set of rules that are inconsistently policed – and treat them with some disdain. Despite the looming deadline, it will take a few high profile prosecutions before everyone treats WEEE as hard and fast rules rather than a set of guidelines.
And a company who claims its products are ‘WEEE compliant’ without understanding the legislation, let alone adhering to it, are making a mockery of the majority of companies who have invested time and money in playing by the rules.
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