RANGE REVIEW: LIGHTING & ELECTRICAL
producers like Dencon. “It’s incredibly difficult for companies who are doing the right thing in terms of compliance and operating legitimately to have such large-scale totally non-compliant competition. I don’t think that particular tweak in the regulations has helped at all, so our response, as the lighting industry should be ‘this is a real problem, please sort it’.”
In fact, he believes a number of changes are needed in order to address issues in the sector, particularly the ‘freeriders’ who are selling online without regulation. He explains: “I can give you an example of some work we did recently. We went on to a particular website run by an online retailer and fulfilment house. Ninety-one of the first 101 records were all free- riders. Of those 91 free-riders, 74 were based in China and Hong Kong and, again, of those 91, amazingly, 65 were available for next-day delivery. So, in other words, they’re already sitting in stock in the warehouse
of said fulfilment house or online retailer and available for anyone to buy and receive. So, a huge quantity of non-compliant stock is already in UK warehouses. And, we’re not talking single lamps here, we’re talking multi-packs, and with large numbers of English-language reviews online, saying “thanks, received the product, it was good” or “had problems,” or whatever. We’re talking hundreds or even thousands of reviews. And, imagine for every review you get of an LED lamp, how many people buy something and don’t bother to put in a review? The scale of this is really big – it’s huge.” He adds: “The sellers involved don’t seem to care two penneth about compliance and that’s partly because nobody’s chasing them.” The issue was recently discussed at a key seminar organised by EUCO Light and attended by around 90 people from various member states. They agreed the best way of addressing this was that online sellers and fulfilment houses should
be legally required to take on the duties of a producer under the WEEE directive of product that they sell or stock on behalf of non-WEEE registered companies.
Mr Harvey explains: “If this was implemented in either the directive or the UK regulations, for those 91 free-riders it would be the online fulfilment house or retailer that would, by definition, have to comply if they didn’t and that, we felt, would solve the problem very largely.” He concludes: “It doesn’t solve all of them because there are some online
guys that don’t have any activity in the UK and so, it’s very hard for UK enforcement officers to take legal action against a company that has no legal entity or presence in the United Kingdom. But, for those who do, this would work very well. So, in the consultation response we’re preparing and we’ll circulate to our members and to anyone else who would like to see it, we are encouraging everybody in the lighting industry to suggest that response. Because we think, if the Government were to do that, it would address the concern.”
For more on how to take part in the open consultation on the WEEE Regulation, visit
https://consult.defra.gov.uk/environmental-quality/weee-regulations- amendments/ and feel free to contact Recolight on 0208 253 9750 or
info@recolight.co.uk to the company’s draft response.
www.diyweek.net
24 NOVEMBER 2017 DIY WEEK 17
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