Exclusive: Lighting industry flouts eWaste laws

Manufacturers and wholesalers of fluorescent lamps are continuing to impose surcharges on customers to cover costs arising from compliance with the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive, despite the practice being in breach of the legislation.

BusinessGreen.com has learnt that business customers ordering fluorescent tubes are routinely finding that a 16p per unit charge for covering the cost of WEEE is added as a separate item on the invoice, despite an official warning from the government last August informing them that the practice was illegal.

Under the WEEE directive – which was introduced last year and aims to ensure that the cost of potentially hazardous electronic waste is covered by the manufacturers – producers are allowed to pass the cost of safe disposal or recycling onto customers.

However, they are not permitted to separate the entire cost as a surcharge, after the government decided that imposing a visible extra charge upon customers would make them resentful of measures that were introduced to help ensure environmental best practices are adhered to.

David Wright, head of external affairs at Scotland's electrical industry trade association Select, said that many electricians and electrical engineers were "disgruntled" at the surcharge, adding that it was "putting people's backs up over recycling".

He added that Select would be inviting a representative of wholesaler trade body the Electrical Distributors Association (EDA) to attend the next meeting of its commercial committee and offer clarification on what was being done to address the issue.

Nigel Ellis, director at the EDA, said he was surprised that WEEE-related surcharges were in breach of the directive, adding that wholesalers were only passing them on to customers as lamp manufacturers themselves were adding surcharges on their prices.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) said that the department had written to lamp manufacturers in August last year advising them that the practice was in breach of the directive.

In the letter, Kath Barker of BERR's WEEE implementation team notes that it had come to the attention of BERR that some manufacturers had notified customers that it was a requirement under the WEEE directive for an additional charge to be added to each lamp and fitting, to cover the cost of treating and recycling under the regulations.

Barker claims that there is no such requirement and that the notification " should be withdrawn immediately".

She goes on to explain that under Regulation 40 of the directive, producers are only allowed to show customers the cost of financing WEEE from private households and that the regulation "does not give a producer the right to unilaterally impose an additional charge on a purchaser to cover the cost of treatment and recycling as required by the regulations".

The spokeswoman for BERR said that businesses that were continuing to see WEEE surcharges imposed on electrical products should notify the Department for Business.