What Do RoHS, WEEE, and REACH SVHC Require for Electronics Exported Between Australia and the EU?

Detailed Explanation

RoHS, WEEE, and REACH are frequently mentioned together because they all bear on the materials and end-of-life handling of electronics, but they're separate legal instruments with different scopes, different obligations, and different regulators. Confusing one for another is a common source of gaps in export compliance documentation.

RoHS: Restricting Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment

RoHS 2 (Directive 2011/65/EU, as amended by Delegated Directive (EU) 2015/863) restricts ten substances above set concentration thresholds in electrical and electronic equipment placed on the EU market:

• Lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE): each restricted to a maximum of 0.1% by weight in any homogeneous material
• Cadmium: restricted to a maximum of 0.01% by weight
• Four phthalates (DEHP, BBP, DBP, DIBP), added by the 2015 amendment: each restricted to 0.1% by weight

The threshold applies per homogeneous material, not per finished product. A single connector with a plastic housing, metal contacts, and a plating layer counts as at least three separate homogeneous materials, and any one of them exceeding its threshold fails the whole part, regardless of the overall product's average concentration. This is the detail engineers most often get wrong when reasoning about RoHS from a system level instead of a materials level.

RoHS 2's scope is close to universal for modern EEE. After a phased transition, it covers essentially all electrical and electronic equipment placed on the EU market, including categories that were excluded or given extended transition periods under the original 2002 directive: medical devices and monitoring and control instruments among them.

WEEE: Producer Responsibility for End-of-Life Electronics

WEEE (Directive 2012/19/EU) is a completely separate obligation from RoHS. Where RoHS restricts what a product can contain, WEEE governs what happens to the product once it's discarded. It makes the producer (defined broadly enough to often mean whichever company first places the product on a given EU member state's market) financially and physically responsible for the equipment's collection, treatment, and recycling at end of life.

The practical obligations are:

• Producer registration in each EU member state where the product is placed on the market, before sale. This is a legal precondition, not paperwork that can be completed retroactively.
• Financing collection and recycling, typically through a compliance scheme membership fee proportional to the volume of equipment placed on the market.
• Marking the product with the crossed-out wheelie bin symbol, indicating it must not be disposed of as ordinary household waste.
• Reporting the tonnage of equipment placed on the market annually to the relevant national register.

Registration happens per member state rather than once across the EU, so a product entering several EU countries typically needs a separate producer registration (or an authorised representative handling registration) in each one. Treat this as a coordination task worth scoping early, not something to discover after goods are already in transit.

REACH and the SVHC Candidate List

REACH (Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006) is broader than electronics: it's the EU's general framework for registering, evaluating, and restricting chemical substances across all industries. The part of REACH that matters most for electronics exporters is the Substances of Very High Concern (SVHC) Candidate List, maintained and periodically updated by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).

Two distinct obligations follow from the Candidate List:

• Article 33, duty to communicate. If an article contains an SVHC above 0.1% by weight, the supplier must pass that information down the supply chain (at minimum, the substance's identity and enough information for safe use), and must provide it to a consumer who requests it, free of charge, within 45 days.
• Article 7, notification/registration. If a substance on the Candidate List is present above 0.1% by weight and above one tonne per year across articles produced or imported by the same company, a notification (or registration, depending on circumstances) to ECHA is required, unless the exposure can be excluded or the use is already covered by an existing registration.

The Candidate List isn't fixed like RoHS's Annex II. ECHA typically updates it roughly twice a year, and a substance already present in a shipping product can become newly listed without anything about the physical product changing. This makes REACH SVHC compliance an ongoing monitoring task rather than a one-time check, unlike a RoHS assessment that's largely settled once the design and BOM are locked.

Material Declarations: How Compliance Is Verified Down the Supply Chain

None of RoHS, WEEE, or REACH can be verified by inspecting a finished PCB assembly. Compliance depends on knowing the substance content of every component, plating, solder alloy, and enclosure material in the bill of materials, most of which is invisible without documentation from the supplier.

The industry mechanism for this is the material declaration. Many component and material suppliers publish Full Material Declarations (FMDs) in the IEC 62474 XML exchange format, an international standard maintained by IEC Technical Committee 111 that largely superseded the earlier IPC-1752A format as the common industry schema, listing every declarable substance and its concentration by homogeneous material. A generic "RoHS compliant" statement or certificate of compliance from a supplier is a much weaker document than a full material declaration. It asserts an outcome without itemising the substance concentrations that a REACH SVHC review or a RoHS homogeneous-material audit actually needs.

RoHS Exemptions: What They Cover and Why They're Time-Limited

RoHS 2's Annexes III and IV list specific, narrowly defined exemptions: applications where a restricted substance is still permitted because no viable substitute exists yet. Familiar examples include lead in certain high-melting-temperature solders, lead in specific glass or ceramic dielectric applications, and lead in particular piezoelectric device applications. Category 8 (medical devices) and Category 9 (monitoring and control instruments) also received longer transition periods under the recast directive before RoHS applied to them in full.

Exemptions are not permanent. Each one is granted for a defined period and must be periodically reviewed and renewed by the European Commission, or it expires and the restriction applies in full. A design that relies on an exemption-covered part needs that exemption's current status checked, not assumed, particularly for a product with a long production life.

Australia's Position: No Domestic RoHS or WEEE, But Global Supply Chains Still Matter

Australia has no general, EEE-specific equivalent to RoHS or WEEE. A product sold exclusively within Australia is not legally required to restrict the ten RoHS substances or to register the manufacturer as a WEEE-style producer. The closest domestic instrument is the Product Stewardship Act 2011, which underpins the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme (NTCRS), a co-regulatory take-back scheme limited in scope to televisions, computers, and computer products, not the near-universal EEE scope WEEE covers. Several Australian states also operate e-waste landfill bans and stewardship schemes, particularly for batteries, but these sit outside the WEEE framework and vary by jurisdiction.

In practice, this rarely means Australian-market electronics are built from non-compliant materials anyway. Component manufacturers sell into a global market dominated by the EU's RoHS requirement, so the overwhelming majority of commercially available electronic components are RoHS-compliant by default, regardless of the destination market. That's already reflected in the shift to lead-free PCB surface finishes as the industry standard. The gap that actually catches engineers out is documentation, not materials: a product designed for the Australian market and never assessed against RoHS, WEEE, or REACH can end up materially compliant by accident while having none of the paperwork (declarations of conformity, WEEE producer registration, SVHC disclosures) that EU market entry actually requires.

Practical Examples

A contract manufacturer building a product for both the Australian and EU markets sources a cable assembly whose PVC insulation is plasticised with DEHP above the 0.1% threshold. The rest of the product is fully RoHS-compliant, but this one homogeneous material fails RoHS on its own. The fix is qualifying an alternative cable with RoHS-compliant insulation, not averaging across the assembly.

A product using a plastic enclosure has been shipping for two years when the flame retardant additive in that plastic is added to ECHA's SVHC Candidate List in a routine update. Nothing about the physical product changed, but the REACH Article 33 communication duty now applies going forward. The manufacturer needs to notify its direct customers and be ready to respond to consumer information requests within the 45-day window, even though the product isn't newly non-compliant with RoHS.

A company that has only ever sold in Australia decides to export to Germany. Beyond the CE marking and EMC/safety documentation already required for that transition (see what changes when exporting beyond RCM to FCC or CE markets), it now needs a RoHS Declaration of Conformity supported by material declarations for the full BOM, and producer registration under Germany's WEEE implementation (ElektroG) before the product can legally be placed on that market. That's a step with no equivalent in the RCM process it's already familiar with from Australia's RCM Declaration of Conformity.

Design Considerations

• Collect material declarations at component selection, not after BOM freeze. Requesting an IEC 62474 material declaration (or at minimum a RoHS/REACH statement referencing the current SVHC list) as part of qualifying a new component is far cheaper than discovering a non-compliant part after the design has gone to production.
• Treat REACH SVHC as an ongoing monitoring task, not a one-time check. Because the Candidate List changes roughly twice a year, a design that was clean at release can pick up a new disclosure obligation without any change to the physical product. A periodic BOM-against-Candidate-List review is the practical way to catch this.
• Register as a WEEE producer before placing goods on an EU member state's market, not after. Producer registration is a legal precondition in most member states; treating it as a formality to sort out post-launch risks delayed market entry or non-compliance.
• Design in RoHS compliance from the outset even for an Australia-only product, if export is plausible later. Specifying RoHS-compliant components and finishes by default avoids a costly BOM requalification if the product is later exported. The incremental cost is minimal since most modern components are RoHS-compliant regardless.
• Track exemption status for any part relying on a RoHS Annex III/IV exemption, particularly in long-production-life products, since exemptions are periodically reviewed and can expire.
• Zeus Design's product development team can help build a BOM-level material compliance process (component declarations, SVHC monitoring, and the RoHS/WEEE documentation an EU-bound product needs) alongside the wider export compliance plan.

Common Mistakes

• Treating a generic supplier "RoHS compliant" statement as equivalent to a full material declaration. A compliance statement asserts an outcome; it doesn't itemise substance concentrations by homogeneous material, which is what a REACH SVHC review or a RoHS audit actually requires.
• Conflating RoHS and WEEE as the same obligation. RoHS restricts what a product can contain; WEEE governs producer responsibility for the product at end of life. Meeting one says nothing about the other, and both need separate documentation.
• Assuming the SVHC Candidate List is static. A product that was fully assessed against REACH at launch can acquire a new Article 33 disclosure obligation years later purely because ECHA updated the list. Nothing about the design needs to change for the obligation to apply.
• Assuming Australia mandates RoHS or WEEE domestically. There's no general legal requirement for a product sold only in Australia, though this shouldn't be confused with the genuine obligations that apply the moment the same product is exported to the EU.
• Leaving WEEE producer registration until after the product is already on sale in the EU. Registration is a precondition for legal market entry in most member states, not a step that can be completed retroactively without risk.