space Press Releases, News Stories

Reuters

Bensusan made an impassioned plea to delegates at the conference to act before it was too late. He said the OECD was looking to combine its green, amber and red lists with the Basel Convention's two lists.

Governments, traders and consumers use the OECD lists to decide which waste materials are hazardous and are safe to export and which should be subject to controls or banned.

Basel's lists determine which hazardous materials are banned and which are not. Bensusan said amber list materials - under which many scrap metals fall - would more than likely be put into the Basel's banned list known as annex 8.

The United Nations Basel Convention will meet in December in Geneva for its 10th anniversary and fifth conference of parties.

"The next two years from the Basel meeting will be major for this industry because the legislators don't understand our industry, the recycling industry and how it works. What happens then will determine the shape of our industry for the next decade, " he said.

He warned that unless the waste/non-waste issue was solved the scrap recycling industry would spend millions of dollars getting materials moved from the banned to the safe list.

The scrap industry has for some time argued that it is hampered by scrap's unfair "waste" tag and ever more burdensome environmental regulations which fail to recognise the environmental benefits the industry achieves through its recycling activities.

The international recycling industry generates over $150 billion in turnover, employs over 1.5 million people globally and handles over 600 million tonnes a year of secondary raw materials, the BIR said.