WEEE producer compliance schemes have banded together to create a ‘producer compliance scheme balancing system’ to handle requests from council for the clearance of WEEE from civic amenity sites.

The move comes as a number of schemes had been issued with ‘Regulation 34’ requests which ultimately force a WEEE compliance scheme to pick up the material from a local authority CA site for free.

Regulation 34 is a mechanism within the WEEE system set up to ensure that WEEE from councils continues to be collected free of charge even if there is no demand for the items in order to generate ‘evidence’ for compliance schemes.

23 WEEE compliance schemes, including WeeeCare, have joined together to establish the producer balancing system, known as the PBS.

Any Regulation 34 request submitted to a compliance scheme which is a signatory to the PBS will immediately be sent to scheme administrator Anthesis via an online portal.

The system is designed to encourage schemes to bid for work – with those taking the least WEEE in proportion to their obligated tonnage footing a larger proportion of the bill for the running of the system.