Mr. Dominic Henry:

I thank the Chairman, Deputies and Senators for the opportunity to speak today. Producer Register Limited was established in 2005 to assist producers achieve compliance under the then newly introduced waste electrical and electronic equipment, WEEE, regulations. We are a not-for-profit company and currently have four staff. While our remit is quite large, it can in today's context be summarised by the registration and acceptance of the reporting of confidential data from producers. This annual registration process is a simple form-filling exercise and can usually be completed in about ten minutes. Producers have the option to register online or by post.

In order to calculate what producers owed in regard to the financial liability for the collection, recovery and treatment of their products at end of life, we developed the WEEE black box in 2005. This is an online portal into which producers can submit their commercially sensitive data and we will then calculate global figures to give to the compliance schemes, as well as pure financial liability details. We are pleased to inform the committee that in the 12 years since the black box started operations, there have been no security breaches or data leaks from the black box.

In 2008, we were asked to take on the same role for batteries and we developed a similar black box. Likewise, we have attached the tyre black box onto the existing black box and this would be very helpful for producers who have multiple obligations. They would be able to register through one portal and those producers that might have battery and tyre obligations, for instance, would be able to report into the same black box.

Our functions under the tyre regulations are, inter alia, the establishment and maintenance of a register of producers placing tyres on the market within the State. We need to determine the market share of each producer placing tyres on the market and that is done through our black box. We calculate the visible Environmental Management Cost, vEMC, liability of each producer and provide that figure only to the compliance scheme, Repak ELT. We advise the compliance scheme of the amount owing by each producer and we are obliged to report to the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment within six months of our year-end on our activities during the previous year and our financial statements. We also need to provide the Minister with any other such information as he might require from time to time. When a producer applies to register with us, we will provide him with a unique registration number which will remain with him throughout the time he is registered with us.