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METALS RECYCLERS STILL FACE THREAT FROM GREEN LAWS

Reuters

BIRMINGHAM, U.K., 10 December 1999 2000 --Environmental laws may pose even greater challenges for the metals recycling sector in the next 10 years than it faced in the last decade, said Caiman Rowntree, president of the British Secondary Metals Association (BSMA).

While the industry had been through huge changes in the 1990s and adapted well to green rules its very existence was still under threat, Rowntree told the BSMA at its annual dinner here onWednesday.

"I said some years ago that the waste legislation as proposed was framed in a way to first control what we did and how we did it. Then when that was in place, the emphasis shifted towards controlling who we traded with," he said.

The scrap trade has been battling against its tag as a waste disposal operator. It says scrap is a vital and often expensive secondary raw material and not waste.

Rowntree said freedom of trade was vital to any industry but especially to the metals recycling sector as the domestic market for scrap was shrinking.

A recent survey by the BSMA showed that 400,000 tonnes of refining/smelting capacity closed in the UK alone in the past 10 years. The latest was IMI Refiners, part of Britain's last copper refiner IMI Plc , which will close in December.

Rowntree said in coming years the scrap trade could expect to hear much of the so-called proximity principle - where waste must be disposed of close to its source of generation - and producer respsonsibility, under which producers are liable for what happens to their products at end of life.

"These two topics along with the Basel Convention and the transfrontier shipment regulations... could if ignored make the metals recycling industry redundant," he said.

The Basel Convention classes some scrap as hazardous waste and its trade is banned between OECD and non-OECD countries.

At a UK-government sponsored conference in London last week representatives from all over the world agreed the metals recycling sector was under threat.

"(Representatives from) countries as diverse as the USA and Cuba, Sweden, the UK and Chile were all of one voice in appealing for relief from the barriers which have been introduced to prevent the free trade of recyclable metal. The main barrier being Basel," Rowntree said.

The impact of a growing swathe of environmental rules was finally dawning on primary and secondary producers, he said.

"This is where we are today, the battle has begun to defend the very existence of the metals recycling industry."

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