Cobham Technical Services (ERA Technology Ltd) has seen copies of recent proposals from the Swedish EU Presidency for the RoHS and WEEE directives. The main changes will affect the scope of these directives.

Negotiations are underway between Member States to amend the RoHS and WEEE directives. Several meetings of the Council of Ministers have taken place but there has been disagreement by some Member States with the Commission’s proposals published in December 2008. Sweden holds the presidency at present and so has circulated to Member States its alternative proposals.

RoHS

The main change is to the scope. This has changed to “all electrical and electronic equipment”. There are some exclusions such as large-scale stationary industrial tools and implanted medical devices but the impact of this change will inevitably be to include products that are not currently in scope. For example, transport is not in any of the ten WEEE categories and so where these “rely on electricity to function”, they could be included, e.g. electric vehicles (that are outside scope of ELV directive), electric trains and possibly aircraft and ships. Equipment used for research and not within the ten categories such as particle accelerators would also be in-scope as a result. Previously scope was unclear especially for fixed installations and it is probable that this change is an attempt to resolve this issue but unfortunately the confusing Articles 2.2 (b) and (c) that aims to exclude from scope “equipment that is part of excluded products” remains unchanged and so this uncertainty will inevitably continue. If a building is seen as a “product” and it “relies on electricity”, then because of these changes, all fixed installations could be in scope as soon as this directive is amended and comes into force.

There are other changes which aim to clarify the substance restriction procedure, clarification of the criteria for exemptions and several other issues such as a new requirement that declarations of conformity must be in all of the languages of EU States in which products are supplied.

WEEE

Due to the proposed change of scope of RoHS, the two Annexes IA and IB have been reinserted although IB is referred to as an indicative list, not as a binding list. The other significant change is that the proposals that would have allowed producers to register only once for the EU have been dropped and placing on the market for WEEE is confirmed as national markets unlike RoHS. The requirement that registration and reporting information is the same in all EU States remains in the proposals.

Further information