The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) announced this month that £775,000 will be made available to local councils to help them increase the collection, re-use and recycling of electrical and electronic goods..

Individual Local Authorities can bid for up to £40,000 each and consortia can bid for much more. Proposals have to be submitted by 30 October 2015 and endorsed by the appropriate waste disposal authority.

The money has been collected via the Distributor Take-back Scheme and the WEEE Compliance Fee.

The Distributor Take-back Scheme allows retailers to pay a fee and provide information instead of offering to take back WEEE in store, which would be difficult for many smaller shops. It has been used to help fund Local Authority projects since the WEEE Regulations were introduced.

The WEEE Compliance Fee is a new mechanism introduced last year whereby producer compliance schemes that are unable to collect enough evidence that they have met their targets for WEEE collection can pay a fee to cover the balance. It was designed to address concerns that the old system of selling evidence led to inflated costs. Both schemes are approved by BIS but are independently administered.

The Compliance Fee regime runs for one year at a time. The Joint Trade Associations Group, set up and chaired by AMDEA, designed the current version and is now preparing a revised version for the next WEEE year which it is hoped will be as successful.