Producers

A producer is any person or organisation who first puts a product on the market and sells it in the UK and could be any of the following:

• one who manufactures and sells electrical and electronic equipment under their own brand
• one who resells, under their own brand, equipment and produced by other suppliers
• one who imports electrical and electronic equipment on a professional basis into an EU Member State

General

Producers of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) as listed in Schedule 2 of the UK WEEE Regulations are responsible for financing and ensuring the disposal of end-of-life products in an environmentally sound way arising from both household and non-household users. There are some exemptions and limits to this (e.g. for non-Household WEEE where there is no like-for-like replacement) that can be found in the detail in the Regulations.

Producer Key Obligations

Producers must join a Compliance scheme (or provide their own Environment Agency approved scheme) which will meet this responsibility by managing and paying for the recycling and recovery of their share of this WEEE and report on what they have done to the appropriate Government authority. Full details may be found in the DBERR Guidelines.

If you are interested in joining the Recolight Compliance scheme as a WEEE Lamp Producer please click here.

Recovery & Recycling Targets

Producers must achieve, for category 5-13 WEEE (gas discharge Lamps) a Recovery rate of 80% of what is collected and a Recycling rate of 80%.Under the WEEE Regulations Producers will be able to pass on their legal responsibilities related to Gas Discharge Lamps to the Recolight Compliance Scheme. An independent management will ensure that individual members market lamps-put-on-the-market data will run the operational and data control for the Compliance Scheme and share information is kept strictly confidential and not disclosed to any other parties.

Product Marking

Producers are required to mark their products with an approved symbol, the ‘crossed out wheelie bin’, and with a unique company identifier. This also includes a requirement for Producers who are Importers to add their unique identifying mark, for traceability purposes, to the imported products beside the original manufacturer's brand where such products might be put on the market by several importers. This particularly relates to generic brands and products that are available in many countries, so that the person or company importing and putting such lamps on the market can be identified by both final end users and the competent authorities.

Details of the ‘crossed out wheelie bin’ marking requirement may be found by in document EN 50419 available on http://www.bsi-global.com/en/Standards-and-Publications/
EN 50419 requires:

"….. a unique identification of the producer. This can take the form of a brand name, trademark, company registration number or other suitable means to identify the producer."

Date Marking
EN 50419 allows two options:

a) "… the date of manufacture/put on the market, in un-coded text in accordance with EN 28601 or other coded text", or
b) "… an additional mark* used in conjunction with the crossed-out wheeled bin …..".

* (The additional mark referred to in b) consists of a solid bar, the dimensions and position of which are defined in relation to the crossed-out wheeled bin).

Page last updated: 23/02/2008