Under the UK Waste Electrical and Electronic Waste (WEEE) Regulations 2013 a Local Authority which does not have a contract for the collection of such material can demand that any WEEE Compliance Scheme they choose must pick up WEEE from their civic amenity sites free of charge.

Under the previous WEEE Regulations, compliance schemes could collect more WEEE than they needed to meet their targets and sell their surplus to competing schemes. Local Authority collection contracts were therefore very lucrative. For the past two years schemes that cannot collect enough evidence have been able to pay a compliance fee instead of having to buy evidence. This has meant that contracts with Local Authorities have become less popular so Local Authorities are increasingly dependent on the option to require any Compliance Scheme to collect their waste.

To spread the load of such requests more equally, WEEE producer compliance schemes have now set up a portal that allows participating schemes to bid for this work – with those taking the least WEEE in proportion to their tonnage obligations paying more of the costs of running the system.