Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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Question 603: To ask the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government the number of businesses that have registered to date on the WEEE register; the percentage of all businesses applicable which this represents; his views on whether the administration of this directive here has been badly handled; and if many businesses and retailers have received no correspondence regarding the directive from the Government. [30182/05]

Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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Some 646 producers of electrical and electronic equipment,EEE, were registered with the WEEE register by close of business Friday, 21 October 2005. My Department does not have a record of the total number of undertakings with producer obligations in accordance with the provisions of the EU Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, WEEE. However, I am advised that the WEEE register had an initial target of registering 300 producers.

Implementation of the WEEE directive has been achieved as a result of close co-operation between all stakeholders — producers, retailers and both central and local government. This process began with the establishment of a task force representative of all relevant sectors, including producers and retailers, in February 2003, to draw up proposals for implementing the directive and no less than two extensive public consultation processes. My Department has been and continues to be available to provide advice and assistance throughout this process. My Department has also taken out advertising in the national press to draw the attention of producers and retailers to their obligations under the WEEE directive. An area of my Department's website has been devoted to WEEE and a number of guidance documents for stakeholders can be found at www.environ.ie.

My Department is monitoring the operation of the scheme closely and where barriers to effective implementation are identified these will be addressed. The core components of the scheme are working well between retail outlets and local authority civic amenity sites household WEEE is being collected from over 100 collection points around the country.

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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Question 604: To ask the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government the reason for the large application fee for the WEEE register and WEEE Ireland; and the breakdown of this fee; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [30183/05]

Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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The EU Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, WEEE, required each member state to introduce regulations providing for a producer funded take-back scheme for consumers of end-of-life equipment from 13 August 2005. Implementation of the directive has been achieved as a result of close co-operation between all stakeholders — producers, retailers and both central and local government and involved the establishment of three new structures as follows: an independent national producer registration body — WEEE register — whose function it is to register all producers of electronic and electrical equipment, determine market share, and approve visible environmental management costs, EMCs, where these are displayed by producers and two compliance schemes to facilitate producers in complying with their obligations under the regulations and in particular to fund the recovery of the waste equipment — WEEE Ireland Limited and the European recycling platform, ERP.

These three new bodies must be self-financing. In the case of the collective compliance schemes there must also be a contingency reserve to safeguard operation of the WEEE regime should a collective compliance scheme cease to operate for whatever reason. In all three cases the bodies are required to operate on a not-for-profit basis.

To fulfil these requirements the current registration fee in the case of WEEE register and membership fees in the case of the compliance schemes were determined by those organisations. My Department has no function in determining the level of these fees. My Department is monitoring the operation of the scheme closely and where barriers to effective implementation are identified these will be addressed. All of the new structures are working effectively and I am confident that the EU WEEE collection target of 4 kg per inhabitant which Ireland has to meet by end 2008 will be met well before then.