**2. WEEE regulation developments in the EU**

The EU was one of the first major economic blocks to implement far reaching regulations to curb the growth of WEEE. The first big steps were taken by the EU with the WEEE Directive that set collection, recycling, and recovery targets for WEEE from 2003 onwards, and the RoHS directive that set limitations on the use of hazardous substances from 2004 and onwards. Since then, the body of regulations concerning WEEE has grown considerably and is still being expanded upon, most recently because of aims set out in the European Green Deal and Circular Economy Action Plans. The EU is seen as having the most advanced and progressive


#### **Household WEEE collection compared to Household EEE put to market**

#### **Table 1.**

*Both the amount of household EEE put to market and the amount of household WEEE collected is rising in the EU27, as well as the relative amount of household WEEE when put to the amount of household EEE put to market in the same year. However, the uptake in household WEEE collected is lower than the uptake in household EEE put to market, causing a growing amount of uncollected WEEE based on data retrieved from the Eurostat env\_waselee database on WEEE (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/product?code = env\_waselee&language = en). A similar trend is seen on the global level where WEEE collection cannot keep up with the growth of the EEE industry based on Data from the Global e-Waste Monitor 2020 [9].*

regulations in the world and its regulations are often followed by other countries in the world [4]. In this section, a background is provided on existing and proposed EU regulations that directly or indirectly affect the role of consumers in *e*CLSCs, so as to provide the state-of-the-art and future scenarios for WEEE regulation. Furthermore, recent trends in household WEEE collection in the EU are presented and compared to the global trend.

## **2.1 WEEE Directive**

The EU's WEEE Directive, which first came into force in 2003, caused a paradigm shift by placing the responsibility for WEEE on the producers and distributors, instead of solely on municipalities, the so-called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) [16, 17]. At its first implementation, besides shifting responsibility to producers, the EU also set WEEE collection targets for its member states [18]. At first the collection target for member states was set at 4 kg of household WEEE per capita or the same weight as the average of collected WEEE in the previous three years by a member state, whichever is higher. In later revisions of the WEEE directive [19], the target collection rates were increased to 45% of EEE put to market (taking the average in the three preceding years) for 2016 till 2018. Since 2019, either 65% of EEE put on the market must be collected or 85% of the WEEE generated within a member state. Furthermore, for each category of household WEEE, separate recycle and reuse target rates are given by the WEEE directive, putting extra pressure to facilitate collection on for example large household appliances or gas discharge lamps.

As previously mentioned, under the directive the producers or distributors of EEE are responsible for the collection of resulting WEEE. This includes a right of consumers to return WEEE, free of charge, to where they originally bought a product [19]. EEE producers and distributors often opt to join a collaborative takeback system to which they pay a fee, based on the average processing costs of a

product group, which will handle the management of WEEE for companies [3, 20]. EPR policy is often badly implemented, and municipalities still play an important and costly role in the collection of WEEE, in part because consumers are often not knowledgeable in the options available to them [21].
