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Keeping track of the producer's market share is important. Producers pay for the treatment of the percentage of WEEE that relates to their market share within a particular category. If 100 tonnes of product has been sold in the IT category, our fictional IT company is said to have a 20 per cent market share. So our company would have to pay for the recycling or recovery of 20 per cent of IT returned, regardless of who the original manufacturer was.

Following the audit trail

To prove products are being recycled, the audit trail also needs to be signed by the authorised treatment facility (ATF) and the company that ends up using the recycled materials.

Local authorities are obliged to provide collection points for householders to dispose of their waste electrical products, free of charge. Councils are also required to collect WEEE if asked, but they may charge for this service.

The collection point, once known simply as 'the rubbish tip', has undergone a few name changes. First, local authorities started referring to these points as civic amenity sites. Then they became household waste recycling centres, or HWRCs. Now they may be referred to as designated collection facilities, or DCFs.

For example, Southwark Council's main waste collection site is its Manor Place depot. This site is a registered DCF. Five categories of WEEE are stored separately on the site. These categories are large household appliances, appliances containing refrigerants, display equipment containing cathode ray tubes, gas discharge lamps (fluorescent tubes), and all other mixed WEEE.

Your computer's monitor will go in one container, while the PC system itself goes in another. The categories reflect the

Barry Van Danzig, CEO of the compliance scheme Electrolink, explained how the audit trail works. "A vehicle takes the container from the DCF to an ATF, where the [WEEE] is recycled in a controlled way. The ATF reports what has happened to all the bits in the container. When the process is complete, evidence is produced by the ATF, and this evidence is procured by the PCS. The PCS submits that evidence to the government to meet its obligation."

As we have established, the EA decides the amount of WEEE a producer must pay for. However, a producer's PCS may not meet this target, or may end up recycling more than it needs to. To meet its shortfall, the producer can buy evidence from the settlement centre. If more than its share of WEEE has been treated, the producer can sell the excess. So if company A's PCS treats 10 tonnes more WEEE than it is obligated to, and company B's treats 10 tonnes less, company B can buy that excess from A through the settlement centre.

Movement of waste from the DCF to the treatment facility is paid for by the PCS operator. Either the PCS collects the waste, or the PCS funds the current method of collection used by the council. There is ambiguity over how money from the resulting scrap will be allocated. Until the new directive came into force, this money went to those running the refuse site. If the PCS takes the scrap, however, the money made from that will go back to the producer. This leaves the refuse site out of pocket, and requires the council to fill the gap, or it may result in the site being closed to the PCS. Either way, council tax payers may end up footing the bill.