*Dit nieuwsbericht is alleen in het Engels beschikbaar. The new Batteries Act (BattG) in Germany comes into force on January 1, 2021. Especially important for you is the change of the notification procedure to a registration procedure. This means you must be registered on the portal of the then relevant authority – Stiftung EAR, which is also the authority for WEEE products – by January 1, 2022 at the latest, possibly even sooner. We have described in this article what you as a manufacturer need to do.

Registration

The current notification procedure for market participation with the UBA will be replaced by a registration procedure with the Stiftung EAR, although a transitional period of one year will apply to cases of placing on the market already notified under the previous legal situation. The registration pursuant to § 4 BattG will be possible as of January 1, 2021 according to information from Stiftung EAR. Pincvision is capable of taking care of this for you.

The registration with Stiftung EAR Is permanent until it is revoked. Important note: if you fail to register while obligated, the penalties are huge. The possible penalties are a fine up to €100,000, profit skimming or a complete sales ban.

As there is no detailed information available from Stiftung EAR on the registration process, we will probably not be able to offer you an automated process until after January 1, 2021. If you decide to carry out the initial registration yourself, please remember to do this on time.

Possible fees

From our point of view, registration with the Stiftung EAR will result in several administrative fees in the future:

For the manufacturer registration pursuant to § 20 para. 1 sentence 1 or sentence 2 BattG, Stiftung EAR – according to the so far only available BMU draft of the corresponding fee regulation – is to charge a fee of €141,70 per manufacturer, brand and battery type or per authorized representative, represented manufacturer, brand and battery type.
The following verification of the manufacturers' system participation required for portable batteries according to § 7 para. 1 sentence 1 BattG entails an additional fee of €22,00 for you.
For the take-back systems, the completed registration and obligatory participation in a take-back system leads to a need to amend their operating license, in which each manufacturer must be listed. For this amendment of the license further fees of €109,70 are due.
If a manufacturer decides to switch to another take-back system, the license must be changed again, which in turn leads to fees of the same amount.

What you should do!

In order to be able to make use of the above-mentioned transitional provisions and possibly not have to be registered with Stiftung EAR until January 1, 2022, we urgently advise you to check your previous notification of market participation registered with the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) and, if necessary, update it before December 31, 2020. This is also a service Pincvision provides.

Dual System

Batteries that you sell will continue to be reported with the applicable compliance scheme. This might be something you’ve seen before, as the waste stream of WEEE has a similar dual system structure. You will now have to declare batteries with the authorities, as well as the compliance scheme.

Pincvision for your Environmental compliance obligations

Please reach out to us in case you have any questions regarding Environmental compliance. We will keep you informed about the developments regarding environmental obligations and enforcement, or completely other trade compliance topics which will be mentioned in our newsletter. Would you like to be sure that you don’t miss out on any news updates? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter!

Source: GRS Batterien

21 dec. 2020 at 16:30

3 min