This report has been prepared in accordance with Article 23 of Directive 2006/66/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 September 2006 on batteries and accumulators and waste batteries and accumulators and repealing Directive 91/157/EEC (also referred to as the Batteries Directive, the Directive or the 2006 Directive in this document)1. This article tasks the Commission with reviewing the implementation of the Directive and its impact on the environment and on the functioning of the internal market. The Directive specifies that the Commission will evaluate:  the appropriateness of further risk management measures for batteries containing heavy metals;  the appropriateness of the minimum collection targets for all waste portable batteries;  the possible introduction of further targets; and  the appropriateness of recycling efficiency levels set by the Directive. It also establishes that — if necessary — proposals for the revision of the relevant provisions of the Directive should be made. The 2006 Directive has already been amended several times2. The evaluation of the Directive has followed the European Commission's better regulation guidelines. Independent consultants have in addition supported the assessment of the information collected3.-The general public, industry stakeholders and representatives of national administrations have participated in this process. The evaluation has addressed the usual evaluation criteria of relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, consistency and EU added value along with the topics requested by its Article, mentioned above. Certain aspects of the Batteries Directive were evaluated in 2014 together with some waste stream Directives (the 'fitness-check')4. The results of this fitness-check are one of the inputs for this evaluation, since it already addressed some of the issues identified by stakeholders. However, the current evaluation is more comprehensive in scope. It considers aspects that were not previously addressed and uses more complete and recent information.