Circular Lighting Report’s Post

Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to a circular lighting report video short. My name is Ryan Maloney and today I'm talking to Nigel Harvey, the CEO of Ricola out about a major change in the law about how companies must comply with waste regulations. Nigel, how are you doing? I'm very well. Thank you and good to be with you, Ray. Good. Now tell me, what is the what is the current situation before this rule change? Well at at the moment whenever a manufacturer or importer sells electrical or electronic equipment in the UK, they have to comply with something called the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations, which means joining a scheme like Recalibrate, which then means they have to pay their fair share of the cost of recycling their products when they reach end of life. So that's the current situation. You know, any producer has to comply with the WE regulations and what's happening is that if you're, if a Chinese company, Ningbo LED or whatever is selling lead panels on Amazon, they're basically free riding on the system because they're not complying with those rules. That's the, the likelihood, yes. And so through online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and a number of others, there are large numbers of companies that are based in in China and elsewhere in in Asia who are selling directly into the UK, but they're not registered for these we regulations. And so they're not paying their fair share of the of the costs. And that means there are everyone else who's who's. Playing by the rules, is that actually at a competitive disadvantage because they are paying the costs of recycling and as I said, you know, these fees are to help with the recycling and dealing with all the waste that's generated down the road. Exactly. So you know, we have thousands of collection points for waste lighting. We collect that, we recycle it and that is paid for by the 220 or so members of our scheme. Will all give us a small amount of money every time they sell a product and that basically is the financing that makes sure that we can do our recycling and other activities properly. And under this rule change, as I understand that it's not the the company supplying the products on these marketplaces, it's the marketplace itself that would be liable correct, exactly. And this is a really neat solution from Defra and hats off to them for taking this approach because obviously, you know, you know, Ningbo led whatever they might be. And thousands, 10s of thousands of others similar. It would be incredibly difficult to take all, all of their data individually, make sure that they then get their fair share of cost. So instead, what they've said is OK, if you're selling via an online marketplace like Amazon, like eBay, then it is Amazon or ebay's responsibility to aggregate the data to of all the thousands of companies that sell through them and then to report that data. Into the Environment Agency, and that's a far simpler approach because obviously it's quite, it's quite straightforward to, to audit Amazon themselves, you know, and they, like other online marketplaces, are very good at data. That's what they do. And so they can aggregate that data and make it available to the Environment Agency and the Environment Agency can check it quite easily. And the presumption is that Amazon and Ali expressed the other marketplaces could pass those costs on to those. Flyers should they want wish to. I mean that that's entirely up to them for how they do that. But yes, it would be it would be entirely appropriate if they pass those costs on back to their their original supplier and and so it effectively means that. You know, the, the, the, the supplies are or will at long last be paying their fair share of costs and it could mean lower fees for the UK suppliers. Well, that's, that's the potential because first of all, it means that the overseas sellers now get a, a fee themselves. So it's a level playing field, right? Then they're no longer at a competitive advantage because they're not compliant, but depending on the size of the market. Chair of these online marketplaces, they could take quite a chunk of the national target and that means everybody else's market share comes down a little bit and that could result in lower costs to to those compliant businesses once this comes into into force. And at the risk of outstanding immodest on your behalf to actually, it's worth saying that you and many people in the sustainability sector have lobbied for this for many years. So it's a bit of a video of victory for those campaigning people. Very, very much so. I mean, we first started work on trying to push this back in 2016. Would you believe, Ray? It was actually when one of our members came up to me at a, at a Lux Live exhibition and said, Nigel, what you doing about this? And the truth is we weren't. So in fact, we, we got the bit between our teeth. We worked with some European partners through a European trade association called Utilite. We ran a number of seminars and, and you know, online webinars for, for government representatives explaining the scale of the problem. Back in 2019, the previous government said that they were, they were going to try to address this change. But then of course COVID happened and Brexit happened, which slowed down the legislation going through. But finally, it's great that the current government has actually taken, taken the initiative and actually got it on the OR or moving towards getting it on the statute book now. So yes, we've, we've worked very hard to try to make this happen and pleased that it has don't know it's great news. And it's also happening. I believe France and Germany have also have got similar rules come in. Yes, they have. And there isn't a Europe wide requirement for online marketplaces to comply in this way. So individual member states have been looking at it and taking action. Yourself so Germany has in Germany the approach is that every single company in the Far East has to comply with the with the regulations and so they they I've got many thousands of new producers on their on their books. France have done it as well so it's gradually moving across Europe and that is to be welcomed. It really is great stuff well good nice to end the year on good news thank you for coming intelligence all about it Nigel thank you very much Ray.