Retailer 'takeback' is coming! So let us help!
With the new WEEE regulations coming into force during 2007, businesses of any size who sell any electrical or electronic items for retail will be obliged to offer a free-of (visible) -charge takeback service for their customers old equipment. As a retailer, your obligations can be discharged by joining a “Compliance Scheme – some of which simply allow you to tell your customers to take items to their local tip, while ensuring that, behind the scenes, the money moves around as it should. But many electrical retailers already offer to take away their customers old appliances when they deliver new – because for many, many people, getting a heavy item to a tip (“Civic Amenity Site”) is impossible – which makes this service a real deal-maker. But equally, it is an unwelcome distraction from their real business, and threatens to consume space that is needed for stock, if the space is available at all!!
If you sell electrical appliances without offering takeback you are risking breaking the law and losing sales to customers who are unable or unwilling to dispose of their old items. District Councils only collect items left at the edge of a properties boundary. That rules out a lot of people.
We operate an Electrical Appliance Re-use Centre and we proudly present a way for you to offer even better customer service, increase your turnover and give your marketing a real boost. We now offer two brand new services enabling you to offer this service without taking on the costs and hassle associated with doing it yourself. We are, and will continue to be, correctly licensed so you can get on with your business, safe in the knowledge that your legal duties are covered, while offering excellent customer service at a very reasonable price.
Option 1
You collect old items as you deliver new…You take the items back to your base, and we collect them from there.
- Minimal space lost through item storage…..we can collect daily, on alternate days or weekly at a time convenient to you
- No skips, no administration, no mess, no hassle.
- No time constraints on your vehicle schedule
- You get to advertise the fact that you are working in partnership with an organisation with an environmentally sound ethos. With the current focus on green issues, this is no small advantage to you.
Option 2
You collect old items as you deliver new…and drop them into our Re-use Centre
- No additional space required at your depot (ideal for high volume businesses where space is at a premium)
- No Skips, no administration, no mess, no hassle.
- Drop off available Monday to Friday (Flexible hours available)
- We provide assistance in unloading your vehicle, minimising delays & leading to better use of your delivery team. (More appliances delivered faster!)
- Extra business generated by the fact you are working with a Re-use Organisation.
- Cheaper than us collecting from you.
Whichever option you choose we provide dedicated staff to arrange everything, coupled with experienced, courteous and pleasant customer service. Items are taken to our dedicated facility in Kidderminster, where our specialist team refurbish a percentage of them, and recycle as much as possible of the remainder. Remanufactured items are sold in charity shops across the county, enabling us to cover our overheads while the charities we work with raise funds.
But no, this doesn’t mean that we are competing with you for customers. Many, many people are more inclined to take the decision to buy new if they don’t feel guilty about throwing away their old equipment – they’ve been telling us about it every day since we opened. This is mainly due to the increase in awareness of environmental issues, such as recycling drives by Local Councils coupled with national television media advertising the need to “reduce, reuse, recycle”.
As such many elements of the community are becoming more aware of their responsibility to the world in which we all live; indeed it has been recently shown that those organisations that have an active environmental policy and display a sense of responsibility to lessen their operation’s impact on the environment actually enhance their business. Indeed one could argue that an environmentally responsible approach to business actually increases your bottom line!
Because our items are sold at low cost and not for profit we appeal to a different market altogether, and by working with us you will be appealing to a growing number of people who want the best while “doing their bit”, something not offered by the “big names” out there………yet!
We enjoy an excellent and well-deserved reputation across the county of Worcestershire, not least because of our community development work. Your customers choose to buy from you not only because of your reputation for customer service and pricing, but also because they want to deal with people who care, and people with whom they can have an ongoing relationship. We are committed to helping the environment – but to us the environment means not only “green” issues (keeping items out of landfill, reducing the amount of raw materials used etc) but people’s local environment – their community. You are an important part of your community and of course it is your source of income, so why not work with us to make it even better.