Manufacturers and recyclers needed to develop their mutual understanding since the products of today would become the recycling industry feed of tomorrow, said Alvaro Rodriguez Martinex of Lajo y Rodriguez SA, Spain, the chairman of the International Environment Council.
His comment prefaced a presentation by the ELV Director of General Motors Europe Willi Fey, in which he outlined his company’s position on the recycling of end-of-life vehicles. Noting that the EU’s ELV Directive demanded the removal of heavy metals from vehicles as well as the organization of take-back systems, he believed the legislation’s reuse and recycling sub-quotas should be removed in favor of pursuing the most appropriate recovery route. Systems for monitoring recovery rates should be made ‘lean and simple’, he added.
Differing approaches within EU member states to the transposition of the directive were creating a high degree of investment uncertainty since treatment technologies that were acceptable in one country or region would not necessarily gain approval in another. ‘It is essential that decisions on technology are based on market demands and political acceptance,’ he underlined.
Fey’s presentation focused specifically on the VW/SiCon initiative to build a commercial-scale plant capable of handling around a third of Germany’s post-shredder residue. This would be based on the principle of finding markets for the recovered fractions in order to maximize economies and recovery rates.
IEC Co-Chair Rolf Willeke of BDSV in Germany agreed with Fey about the importance of post-shredder technology in meeting ELV Directive targets. However, he also expressed concern that national coverage would not be achieved by the time the directive’s quotas became live in 2006. ‘Our industry will have to decide what to do if post-shredder technology is not available to us,’ he said. ‘We need a transition period.’
BIR’s Environmental & Technical Director Ross Bartley returned to the issue of EU waste shipment regulations, and the risk of traders being written out of the market, a topic covered during the previous BIR meeting.
In Berlin, he explained that BIR had submitted separate definitions of the trader/dealer and broker, thereby giving recognition to their individual roles within a well-functioning market. ‘We hope this is taken on board,’ he commented.
Bartley noted that although the OECD Recommendation on Environmentally Sound Management with its core performance elements was not yet adopted by the OECD, it was already being used by national governments.
On the subject of EU enlargement, Bartley pointed out that notifications were required for exports of all materials designated as waste to the following five new member countries: Hungary, Latvia, Malta, Poland and Slovakia.