Dumping waste abroad – is it time to end ‘not in my backyard’ mentality?

By Will Bland

Date: 15/09/05

Rules on the shipment of waste into and around the EU have long been a headache for the Union's lawmakers.

The desired objectives of price competition and a borderless internal market are in tension with safety and the security of the environment.

Members of the European Parliament's environment committee yesterday (14 September) made a bid to resolve these tensions when they discussed the waste shipment directive.

Those pushing to incorporate the waste and recycling industries into the internal market have had a series of obstacles to overcome. The first of these has been the obstinacy of national governments. Germany's critics, for example, argue that the country has been obstructing the waste shipment directive in order to protect its own incineration companies from competitors in Belgium and Italy who charge half the price.

The impetus behind the new legislation came from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which in 2001 sought to establish international standards for the treatment of waste. The main aim of the new directive is to simplify the control procedures for shipment of waste.

In future, all shipments of hazardous waste such as asbestos will require explicit and written consent from the country of export as well as the country of import. The proposal also ensures that a shipment of waste should be monitored "all the way to the end" - until it has been incinerated or reused. Lawmakers argue that the simpler laws will benefit both waste shipment companies and the environment.

The Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) has questioned these benefits. One point of contention was the shipping of waste for interim processing. A used car cannot be sent straight to a steel works, it must first be sent for dismantling and de-pollution. Some MEPs would like to restrict the transport of a used car that must undergo dismantling, de-pollution and recycling in the same member state. In a small country like Luxembourg there are few facilities where used cars undergo the dismantling and de-polluting process.

The BIR argues that these proposals are anti-competitive since they limit the choice of incinerating and recycling facilities at which the used car can be treated. The Council of Ministers and the Commission have supported the BIR's position but the Parliament's environment committee believes that allowing interim processes will make it very difficult to track waste shipments thereby opening the door to fraud.

The lawmakers hope to bring greater transparency to the treatment of waste. Under the new proposals, a firm's arrangements for recycling and waste disposal will be made public. The BIR has also resisted these measures, arguing that details of a firm's waste are commercially sensitive and if they were made publicly available, on websites for instance, could be abused by competitors.

Outside the EU, countries have been complaining that it is increasingly difficult for them to sell their recycled raw materials to member states. US companies have found that there are policy inconsistencies between member states.

They have complained that the European market for secondary waste materials is over-regulated. In a recent example, ambiguity over the classification of copper and aluminium scrap led to a US ship spending twelve months in a Finnish harbour unable to unload its cargo.

The Basel Convention requires waste exporters to classify their materials according to a scale from green (safe) to red (hazardous). The ship's cargo had been classified on the green list when it left the US but when it arrived in Finland the local authorities upgraded the assessment to amber. Eventually the ship returned to the US with its cargo of scrap untouched. Many US firms now ship their secondary waste materials to non-European regions like China where demand is high and the regulatory climate is less obstructive.

Article reports on the discussion of the proposed legislation on the shipment of waste at the European Parliament's Environment Committee, 14 September 2005.

European Commission: DG Environment: Policies: Waste: Shipment of waste http://ec.europa.eu/comm/environment/waste/shipments/index.htm

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