Comply with the WEEE legislation in Flanders

Introduction

The Directive of the European Parliament and the Council on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) was approved on 27 January 2003 and published on 13 February 2003, date of commencement.

As in most EU countries, the WEEE Directive has been transposed into the Belgian legislation. However, this Directive was in Belgium transposed at the Regional level. Furthermore, a take-back obligation had already been in place in Flanders since 1 July 1999 applying to electrical and electronical equipment from households. As a result, the transposition of this Directive in 2004 was an adaptation of the Flemish legislation and not the creation of entirely new rules.

Who has to comply

In Belgium, the importers into Belgium and the Belgian producers of electrical and electronic equipment fall under the WEEE legislation. Companies that produce or import consumer equipment (B2C) as well as producers and importers of business equipment (B2B) have to comply with the legislative prescriptions. However, a foreign company can take over the obligations from his customers. This can be seen as a customer service.

How to comply

Collective vs. individual

Basically, the WEEE legislationmakes every producer (or importer) responsible for the take-back and environmentally sound management of the waste of the electrical and electronic equipment.

In practice, there are two options:

• Join a collective system that carries out your administrative and logistical obligations. In Belgium, there is for the moment only one collective system: Recupel (more information on www.recupel.be)
• Take care of the collection and treatment of the WEEE yourself and introduce an individual waste management plan. This plan gives the government detailed information on how the financing, collection, recycling and reporting will take place. This plan has to be approved by the three regions.

Register

When you join the collective system or send in an individual waste management plan, you will be automatically registered. In the near future we will organize a centralized registration database for the 3 regions together.