A group representing Europe’s WEEE recyclers has called for European governments to use the transposition of the Recast WEEE Directive to capture the ‘large flows’ of WEEE that it claims are currently not being counted towards recycling targets. According to a report on Europe’s WEEE regimes released jointly by the European Electronics Recyclers Association (EERA), lighting manufacturing body LightingEurope and digital technology group DIGITALEUROPE, as much as one third of WEEE is being recycled outside of producer take-back schemes. In the report, the groups call for enforcement of mandatory reporting obligations for all permitted reprocessors of WEEE in order to meet targets being brought in under the Recast. The groups claim that currently the average WEEE collection rate among EU Member States is around a third, but research suggests that another third is being collected by treatment operators and not being reported. One UK Producer Compliance Scheme, B2B Compliance, has responded by referring to the achievement of the new recycling targets by purely counting WEEE only as unrealistic, because the vast majority of non-household used EEE doesn’t end up as WEEE in the first place. Project Director David Burton stated “ Much used EEE is either resold to added value markets, often for exports, or stripped for spares until there is nothing left that can be defined as WEEE. Without the use of ‘Substantiated Estimates’, allowed within the Directive, and the creation of protocols for estimating weights and categories going down these other routes, we will not be capturing a true picture of what happens to used electrical and electronic equipment”.