Battery Regulation

(101) Producers should have extended producer responsibility for the management of their batteries at the end-of-life stage. Accordingly, they should finance the costs of collecting, treating and recycling all collected batteries, carrying out compositional surveys of mixed collected municipal waste, reporting on batteries and waste batteries, and of providing information to end-users and waste operators about batteries and appropriate re-use and management of waste batteries. The new rules on extended producer responsibility under this Regulation are intended to ensure a high level of environmental and health protection in the Union by maximising separate collection of waste batteries and ensuring that all collected batteries are recycled through processes that reach high rates of recycling efficiency and recovery of materials in light of technical and scientific progress. The obligations related to extended producer responsibility should apply to all forms of supply, including distance selling. Producers should be able to exercise those obligations collectively, by means of producer responsibility organisations taking responsibility on their behalf. Producers or producer responsibility organisations should be subject to authorisation and they should demonstrate that they have the financial means to cover the costs entailed by the extended producer responsibility. When laying down administrative and procedural rules for authorisation of producers for individual compliance and of producer responsibility organisations for collective compliance, Member States should be able to differentiate processes for individual producers and producer responsibility organisations to limit the administrative burden on individual producers. In this context, it should be possible to consider permits issued in accordance with Directive 2008/98/EC to be an authorisation for the purposes of this Regulation. Where necessary to avoid distortion of the internal market and in order to ensure uniform conditions for the modulation of the financial contributions paid to producer responsibility organisations by producers, implementing powers should be conferred on the Commission. Waste management operators carrying out collection and treatment in accordance with this Regulation should be subject to a selection procedure by producers of the relevant batteries or by producer responsibility organisations acting on their behalf, in accordance with Directive 2008/98/EC. Where waste management operations take place in a Member State other than that in which a battery was made available on the market for the first time, producers should cover the costs incurred by the waste management operators in the Member State where the waste operations take place. In the discussion on possible proposals for Union legislative acts on end-of-life vehicles and waste electrical and electronic equipment, the establishment of a cross-border extended producer responsibility mechanism for waste batteries, including those incorporated into vehicles or appliances, between the relevant actors, should be considered. Furthermore, the adoption of other measures should be considered, such as information management and verification tools, including, as appropriate, authorised representatives for extended producer responsibility, waste management operators, producer responsibility organisations, digital product passports and registers of producers, and national vehicle registration systems when covering electric vehicle batteries.