Recycling: A Global Movement with a Promising Future

Recycling is gaining ground – worldwide. How fast the recycling community is growing is demonstrated by the recent BIR World Recycling Convention & Exhibition, organized by the Bureau of International Recycling in Denmark. This event set a record with nearly 1,800 participants from more than 60 countries. Furthermore, a total of 162 companies and national federations were admitted as members of the international trade association.

At BIR’s general assembly meeting, the Plastics Committee became division status like the Ferrous, Non-Ferrous, Paper and Textile branches. The plastics sector would attract “significant media attention due to the pressing issue of plastics pollution – a matter that is of global concern and currently under discussion in ongoing United Nations negotiations for a global treaty on plastics,” Alicia Garcia-Franco from BIR was quoted. The World Recycling Association had been “very active in these discussions”.

A major issue at the BIR International Trade Council session was the European Union’s recently adopted Waste Shipment Regulation (WSR) and its potential to disrupt long-established international flows of recyclables captured under the EU’s “waste” definition. As reported by BIR, simultaneously “there was general agreement on the need for open lines of communication and collaboration to ensure the smoothest possible implementation of the regulation”. According to Martyna Robakowska from the European Commission, the key objectives of this regulation were to ensure that the environment was protected in relation to waste shipments and that the EU met its requirements under multilateral environmental agreements.

After May 2027, exports to non-OECD countries would be allowed only if the receiving country had notified the EU Commission of its willingness to accept the material. That notification would need to be supported by documentation covering, for example, a list of the requested waste, the national waste management plan/strategy, the country’s environmental protection legislation and a list of its authorized waste recovery facilities. Meanwhile, EU exporters would have to demonstrate that the waste was to be managed in an environmentally sound manner by ensuring independent audits were conducted on the facilities to which they were shipping.

In any case, more and more countries are on the way to dealing with the waste generated in the country. Australia has ambitious targets, inter alia, to increase recycling rates (page 20). That applies also to Saudi Arabia (page 3) and Singapore (page 25). Jamaica is on the move to energy-from-waste (page 28). And in the USA, a project regarding textile waste found a billion-dollar opportunity (page 6).

We hope you get a lot of new and useful information from reading this current magazine.

Yours, Brigitte Weber