To be honest, it has been very quiet from both the supply and the sales side, especially for copper grades. There is not any particular demand for any material except for some of the high grades.
There is more than enough of the high grades of scrap available, and people just keep pushing to sell it to the mills. So [mill] demand is just moving further backwards every day. There is no huge supply at the moment from the small suppliers simply because of the prices in relation to the LME and it takes them a little while to get accustomed to that. Having said that, the copper consumers are full of almost anything at the moment, specialties excepted. There are refineries with no interest in copper scrap like that coming from the electronic scrap stream.
The product side isn’t the biggest issue, especially in the Netherlands. Our local authorities are once again finding it necessary to adjust perception of the Basel Convention. The cross boundary transport of practically any kind of electronic scrap that hasn’t been completely dismantled into its components and sorted thus has become a bereavement, so we have to notify the authorities when we transport, which wasn’t the case a few weeks ago. It is a brand new development, and they started enforcing it pretty much immediately. Usually they give you some kind of a grace period to get accustomed to the new regulation. In this case, they have determined that all non-dismantled electronics are to be treated as a hazard. You now have to do a prior notification of transport.
The farce about the whole thing is that if you take a computer and dismantle it into its components, like the circuit board the power supply, the floppy drive, the casing, etc. and you pack all those components in separate boxes and you pack all those in a truck. Even though all those constituents are non-hazards, they would still be considered a hazard because it is two types of waste—even though all the constituents are non-hazards. It gets worse when there are hazardous components, such as batteries like those in big servers. Then it’s not amber but it’s red. Once you remove these hazardous materials then it is amber.
The hazardous part is always quite clear. If you are going to transport hazardous material, you have to apply for a license, but after you remove the hazardous material you still have to dismantle it to make it clean which essentially is either shredding it, because that is considered separation, or actually disassemble the units which we can’t pay for in our western civilizations because people are too expensive to pay. But seeing as we don’t have any electronic scrap consumers in the Netherlands we can choose between building a shredder or dismantling.
Initially this new rule hasn’t been officially publicized, which means a lot of companies dealing in that material didn’t know that they were breaking the law. It has only been communicated to the environmental offices along the border so it becomes a problem when people don’t even know they are breaking the law. Once they get stopped, then they know. Just applying for the licenses, the notification procedure, will probably take about three months. You either stop buying or you have to have cash or make space to stock. The implications are quite far-reaching. The Netherlands is a small country so a lot of electronic traders buy from outside the Netherlands, which is now illegal. They usually to sell to a final consumer located outside the country, which means selling is also illegal unless they have notification.
The problem simply lies in the fact that Basel Convention is not a clear-cut thing but is largely up for interpretation in certain cases such as this.
The Dutch Association is evaluating the document, which is lengthy and has been written by the Dutch authorities, and they will obviously do their best to correct this. I am not seeing any relief in the short term. The BIR (Bureau of International Recycling) will be the next to be approached to see if they can do something—that may be another five or six weeks from now.
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Boris Bronneberg can be contacted at boris@source-montan.de.