China E-Waste Law e-waste deadlines and compliance calendar

The State Council promulgated the Regulation on Recovery and Disposal of Waste Electrical and Electronic Products on 25 February 2009. The regulation and the MEE treatment-qualification measures both took effect on 1 January 2011; the State Council regulation was revised on 2 March 2019. A 60-day application window for enterprises already treating e-waste when the licensing measures began was transitional and expired in 2011.

The rules apply to recovery, treatment, and related activities for waste products listed in the national Waste Electrical and Electronic Product Treatment Catalogue. Treatment includes dismantling, extracting material for raw material or fuel, changing physical or chemical characteristics to reduce volume or hazardous constituents, and final placement in a compliant landfill. Repair, refurbishment, and resale after repair or refurbishment are outside that treatment definition.

Participating in collection does not make a producer, seller, repair business, after-sales service provider, or collector a treatment enterprise. Recovered covered waste must go to a qualified treatment enterprise. A collector that treats the waste itself must first obtain the treatment qualification. The State Council regulation separately allows a province-approved centralized treatment site that has the required centralized pollution-control facilities and complies with the applicable standards; do not treat location in an industrial park as proof of that approval.

An applicant submits its written qualification application and supporting materials to the ecology and environment authority of the city with districts where the treatment facility is located. Within three working days after accepting the application, that authority must publicize the application information. The public-comment period must last at least ten working days. The authority must review the materials, conduct an on-site inspection, and decide within 60 days after acceptance.

The certificate records a validity period, but the national licensing measures do not prescribe one duration for every certificate. Use the date printed on the certificate and the issuing authority's process for expiry planning. Do not substitute the separate five-year cycle for revising the regional treatment development plan for the certificate's own validity period.

A treatment enterprise must prepare an annual monitoring plan and conduct routine monitoring of pollutant discharges. It must retain monitoring reports for more than three years. It must also maintain a treatment-data information system, report basic treatment data and related information periodically to the issuing authority, make that information public, and retain the basic treatment data for at least three years. The national measures do not give one calendar date for the annual plan or one national interval for periodic data submissions, so record the issuing authority's schedule instead of inventing a default date.

Some recurring dates belong to authorities, not operators. The local ecology and environment authority must conduct supervisory monitoring of a treatment enterprise's pollutant discharges at least once every six months. By 31 March each year, the city authority must report the prior year's certificate issuance to the provincial authority.

For each waste route, keep enough information to show why the product is in scope, who collected it, which qualified enterprise treated it, and whether the certificate covered the facility, category, process, and capacity at the time. The national rules expressly require operator monitoring and treatment data; the broader chain-of-custody file below is a practical control for checking the qualified-treatment route, not a prescribed national form.

Keep China RoHS product-content and marking records separate from end-of-life treatment records. The State Council e-waste regulation requires specified hazardous-substance content and recovery information on the product or in its instructions, but a material declaration or RoHS label does not show that discarded products reached a qualified treatment enterprise.