Recolight studied the extent of online freeriding in the UK. To do this, Recolight chose an online retailer/fulfillment house, and ran a search on “LED bulb”. This revealed the following:
- 91 of first 120 records were freeriders (The producer was not listed on the UK register of WEEE compliant companies, published monthly by the Environment Agency)
- Of those 91 freeriders:
- 15 were EU based
- 2 were US based
- 74 were China/Hong Kong based
- Of those 91 freeriders:
- 65 had product available for next day delivery. This implies that the non-compliant stock was already held in a UK based warehouse.
- Virtually all items listed were multi-packs of LED bulbs, with large numbers of recent English language reviews, implying large numbers of sales.
The study was completed in September 2017.
