WEEE

Not a certificate — an obligation you register for

WEEE is where sourcing conversations most often reveal a misunderstanding, because buyers ask for a “WEEE certificate” the way they ask for a test report. There is no such document in the sense implied.

The WEEE Directive governs collection, treatment, and recycling of electrical and electronic equipment at end of life. It does not test the product. It places a producer responsibility on whoever first places goods on the market in a given EU member state — which, when you import from us, is you, not us.

That responsibility is discharged by registering with a compliance scheme, reporting the volumes you place on the market, and paying fees that fund collection and recycling.

It is per-country, and that surprises people

WEEE is a directive, transposed into national law by each member state. There is no single EU-wide registration. A brand selling into Germany, France, and the Netherlands registers in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, each with its own registry, its own reporting cadence, its own fee structure, and in several cases its own requirement for a locally established authorised representative if you have no entity in that country.

Marketplaces have made this considerably more visible. Major platforms now require a valid national registration number before allowing listings in several member states, and will suspend listings without one. For distance sellers this has turned a compliance box into an operational blocker.

Where batteries add a second layer

An e-bike battery sits at the intersection of two regimes. WEEE covers the electrical equipment; battery-specific obligations now sit under the EU Battery Regulation 2023/1542, which replaced the old Batteries Directive and carries its own registration, labelling, collection, and due-diligence duties.

Practically, an importer of e-bike batteries may face registration under both regimes in the same country. Treating “we did WEEE” as covering the battery obligations is a common and expensive assumption. Our EU importer checklist separates the two.

What we can and cannot do

We supply the product-side information a compliance scheme asks for: material composition, weight breakdown by category, battery chemistry and weight, and the labelling required on the pack including the crossed-out wheeled bin symbol.

What we cannot do is register on your behalf. Producer registration is a legal act by the entity placing goods on the market, and a Chinese manufacturer cannot be that entity for an EU importer. Any supplier claiming their goods are “WEEE certified” in a way that removes your registration duty is describing something that does not exist.

If you are setting up EU distribution, budget for registration and reporting per country as a running cost. It is small relative to the goods, and it is the kind of obligation that becomes expensive only when discovered late. See also RoHS, which covers the substances in the product rather than its end of life.