Can you avoid the reporting treadmill this year?

The EU`s focus on resource preservation and reuse has put manufacturers under increasing pressure over the past two decades to meet strict legislative requirements on environmental reporting. This has created a tricky path for producers to navigate as reporting requirements differ in each country. Depending on the size of your company, you could have come back to work this January facing hundreds of reporting deadlines, usually to complete before the end of February. 

Producers and manufacturers across Europe have been under the spotlight for many years when it comes to environmental reporting. Since the early 1990s, European countries have been implementing packaging regulations to encourage the recycling, recovery and reuse of packaging waste under the umbrella of EPR (extended producer responsibility) directives. It didn`t take long before environmental reporting was introduced for WEEE and then waste batteries and now we see a whole suite of environmental legislation covering textiles, furniture, medical sharps, medicines and products to name a few.

And now it`s that time of year again when the bulk of EPR submissions for packaging, WEEE and batteries are due and you can feel like you`re fighting a never-ending battle of data reporting, especially if you can`t find all the notes you made about the submissions last year! To complicate matters even further, different countries can have vastly different requirements, ranging from the types of products and materials you need to report, to the fees you have to pay. 

Are you reporting correctly?

Reporting periods tend to fall at similar times and in groups. There are a cluster of annual packaging submissions due at the beginning of the year along with the Q4 submissions for quarterly reporting and the monthly submissions for December. This starts to get complicated as you are juggling a number of different timetables and submissions, add into that the  numerous different material requirements and product categories for packaging, WEEE and batteries all at the same time and you have more than a full time job on your hands. 

The full and Original article published here