WEEE won’t come easy you’ll just have to wait

Pity the manufacturer who needs to know what systems will help him comply with WEEE and RoHS (European Directives 2002/96/EC on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, and 2002/95/EC on the Restriction of certain Hazardous Substances). The DTI's WEEE 'helpline' (020 7215 0972) merely tells the hapless enquirer "It's all on the DTI website." Some of it is, after a struggle. A 'WEEE' site search confronts you with 87 PDFs and other documents. RoHS attracts 51. Most are out of date. The best document, at www.dti.gov.uk/sustainability/weee, has no obvious link to it! But none of it tells you what systems/IT you need. How could it when the government timetable is in tatters and will be shredded further by the undeclared election campaign? Both directives were to be enacted by 13 August 2004 but, so far, fox hunting has come first. The DTI press office says simply: "Ministers are currently considering the content and timing of the framework" for WEEE and RoHS. Says the helpline: "When we've got those decisions we'll announce them." Small wonder that the British Computer Society, which represents industry IT department professionals, was unaware of the WEEE/RoHS issue and could offer no-one for interview. WEEE and RoHS deal with opposite ends of the manufacturing production spectrum. At the design end, RoHS forbids industry from putting new electrical or electronic equipment on the market from 1 July 2006 which contains lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls or polybrominated diphenyl ethers. Not sure what 'on the market' means? See www.dti.gov.uk/sustainability/ weee/weee_rohsexecs.pdf. If you don't comply, the authorities can take your product off the market. It happened to Sony in 2001 when, under a local RoHS forerunner, the Dutch government blocked the sale of 1.3 million Sony Playstations whose cables contained too much cadmium. Since RoHS is a design issue, says Dr Chris Robertson of ERA Technology, which won an EC contract to devise ways of complying with RoHS, it is also a supply chain issue. Whoever supplied the components for your products, or even if someone else assembles them with your badge on, you – not the component maker or assembler – are responsible for what's in them. "If you are someone like Nortel you use a huge number of suppliers. They are all sending you information for the systems they are making in different formats. You want to try to get the data into your design system so that, when you decide to use that particular component, it also pulls in the bill of materials [BoM] for the product." Then anyone can look at "the RoHS compliance of the thing as a whole." Someone else's problem? But what a lot of people will do, says Robertson, is push the problem back to their suppliers and ask them to provide declarations which will be taken at face value. There is also a growing list of exemptions but, if they don't apply, ERA's EC report suggests a self-declaration model as used for CE marking. If asked, producers would have to demonstrate how they've gone about it. The data will need to be secure and part of an audit trail. As Robertson says: "If there's a circuit board in there, who did it come from? And what information have you got from them to demonstrate that it's a compliant component? Did they supply you with information about its composition or did they provide you with a written assurance? If so, how did you decide whether to just accept it, or did you investigate it further? If the latter, what did you do about that and what were your judgements?" In the detail, Rugby contract electronics manufacturer Zirkon warns that: "Component manufacturers and suppliers are using the same part number for both leaded and lead free components, so identification of parts is likely to be a headache and is an issue we will be raising with our suppliers." In short, there's a need for simple data formats so that everyone knows what's in the product. RosettaNet and other data exchange formats, like those used for the reporting of hazardous chemicals or precious metals, are too complex for an application which concerns only six materials. But for the moment, says Robertson, WEEE presents a bigger and more immediate challenge than RoHS. WEEE operates at the other end of product life. It makes producers – the brand owners – responsible for the collection, treatment, recovery and disposal of waste equipment put on the market after 13 August 2005. This means that, whether they do the disposal or have someone else do it on their behalf, the producers of 10 categories of IT, telecoms and domestic electrical goods, from computers to cameras, have to pay for disposing of them. (See www.dti.gov.uk/sustainability/ weee/WEEEguidance_draft.pdf, sections 8 and 9.) To comply, every manufacturer must register with a central authority – probably a national clearing house (NCH) – and provide it with annual lists of every product it has supplied, where they have gone to and how their recycling has been arranged. The compulsory register will list which category each product falls in, and even this is not simple because some categories overlap and some products cover more than one category. The producers must respond to 'reasonable requests for information' about products for those carrying out their dismantling and recycling. They must also provide information about their market share, to allow calculation of the contribution they must make towards disposing of historical products in that category – those sold before August. And they must provide financial guarantees to cover the recovery or recycling of future products in case the company goes bust. Some of this may mean the provision of accounting information – see KPMG's paper on www.dti.gov.uk/sustainability/weee/kpmgreport.pdf. It certainly means keeping meticulous records and supplying them to the NCH and others in the right format. But what data format will be used, and how that data will be shared back to a producer – to turn market share into fees, for example – is unclear. No tenders have yet been requested to supply the system. Until the NCH is set up under legislation, says Robertson, "there is nobody to send the information to." The DTI says details will be decided after the pending announcement. More complication It adds that some companies can already track their goods. This applies to some members of high-tech companies in Intellect, formerly the Computing Services and Software Association (www. intellectuk.org). And Robertson notes that many manufacturers are already placing direct contracts with recyclers. Others are going through compliance schemes that take on WEEE obligations for a fee. Schemes include: B2B Compliance, set up by the British instrumentation and controls trade organisation Gambica; Recycling Electrical Producers' Industry Consortium (Repic); Sustainalite Compliance, set up by the Lighting Industry Federation; Photo Imaging Council Compliance Scheme (PICCS); and Valpak. But there is one further complication. Though RoHS is a single European act directive implemented everywhere, the WEEE directive is not. It sets out minimum provisions, so multi-national manufacturers need to track the different implementations in each of their EU markets. As for the timetable, some of the reporting and sending out of bills will be late but the authorities will catch up. So there isn't much producers can do except register when they have to. If all this gives you an appetite for more, there's the Energy Using Products (EUP) directive. This covers all the products subject to WEEE and will go into law this year. It isn't on the DTI website, and what form it takes will depend on government experience with WEEE and RoHS. You have been warned.