CONSUMERS could be forced to pay an extra £5 to £15 for every washing machine, fridge, kettle or hi-fi they buy from next year, if electronic equipment manufacturers get their way.

The bosses of four major European electrical goods manufacturers are scheduled to meet Mike O’Brien, the Energy Minister, on Wednesday, to urge him to adopt a recycling levy on all new products.

The chief executives of Bosch Siemens, Merloni, Hoover Candy and Panasonic will say that the recycling fee is necessary to recoup the £500 million-a-year bill imposed on them by a new European directive designed to prevent the build-up of mountains of decaying fridges.

The proposed fixed fee would be levied on each category of electrical goods — washing machines, fridges, vacuum cleaners — regardless of whether consumers choose a more efficient or environmentally friendly product.

The equipment makers, who supply the £10 billion a year UK consumer goods market, argue that a transparent fee is the only way to recover the cost of recycling from the consumer. They promise that the fee will be ring-fenced for the sole purpose of complying with the European environmental legislation.

“The fairest way to recover these costs is through the use of a transparent fee. It will minimise consumer costs and will engage the public in the whole issue of recycling electrical and electronic goods,” said Phillip Morton, chief executive of Repic, the industry consortium formed to discharge manufacturers’ responsibilities under the directive.

A version of the fixed fee has already been introduced in Belgium and the Netherlands. France and Spain are in the process of bringing in such a fee.

The Government is currently resisting a visible fee, preferring to leave retailers and producers to thrash out a solution between themselves.

However, the producers believe that, without transparent auditing of the recycling charge, retailers will simply add a higher mark-up to the cost of goods, forcing prices for the consumer even higher.

Individual retailers are understood to have some sympathy with the visible fee proposal, but a spokesman for the British Retail Consortium said that the retail sector preferred a voluntary solution and was against a mandatory recycling fee.

The draft European directive obliges shops to take back virtually all forms of disused electrical equipment when customers buy a new item. However, the cost of collecting and recycling the goods falls on both producers and some retailers, including Curry’s and Dixons.

Repic’s members, who represent more than 70 per cent of the electrical and electronic goods sold in the UK, believe that without a fee, the industry’s 30,000 jobs in the UK could be under threat as production of goods is forced overseas to Asian countries with lower costs.

“This is an additional and retrospectively imposed cost which, based on the Government’s own figures, roughly equates to the current level of profitability of this sector,” Mr Morton said.

The directive comes into force on August 13, 2005, but consumers will not see the full effects of the new policy until 2008.

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