Channel players have voiced concerns about how the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive will be implemented. This follows the government’s announcement of a new timetable for the directive (CRN, 31 July).
Louise Marshall, corporate risk manager at Brother UK, said: “While we welcome the announcement of a timetable, we are concerned that many issues still remain to be resolved. The legislative process will be operating to some challenging deadlines.
“Producers are required to join a compliance scheme by 15 March 2007. However, the scheme providers are only being invited to submit applications from 1 January, giving the Environment Agency less than three months to grant approval.”
The consultation document raised some important issues for resellers, according to Brother.
“Re-use rather than recycling of equipment has now been made a formal requirement of compliance schemes,” Marshall said. “This ruling has the potential to have a big impact on sales.”
Ian Gobey, commercial director at PC Disposals, said: “The government’s announcement still leaves the channel without any definitive position on how they should plan for the implementation of the WEEE directive in the longer term.
“The logical approach is for the channel to work with what they know. They need to concentrate on servicing customer needs and to use end of life asset management services to enhance their front-end business.”
Steve Cowley, sales manager at distributor Hammer’s storage products division, said: “We teamed up with Life Cycle Services last year to offer our customers an advanced disposal pack so that they are covered whenever WEEE comes in. We sell about 300 servers a month and for the past nine months we haven’t sold one without the advanced disposal pack.”
Alex Ward, commercial director at distributor Midwich, said: “Along with Brother, we’re talking to our other
vendors about how we can work with them to comply and how we can support our resellers, because they are the ones that deal with end-users.”
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