We're confident we'll see regulations coming into play by next summer
Ian Hetherington, BMRA
Speaking to letsrecycle.com last week, Ian Hetherington revealed that European Commission technical discussions on criteria to define end-of-waste were at a “fairly advanced stage”, and the negotiations he had been involved in had finished at the start of this month.
He explained that the next step in the development of formal end-of-waste criteria was a final report, which the BMRA was “expecting” to be submitted to the Commission itself in September, and added that: “We're confident we'll see regulations coming into play by next summer.”
While acknowledging there would then be a period of time before the regulations came into force in the UK, he said: “I think it'll be potentially less than a couple of years before they implement it here.”
The BMRA has long campaigned for the government and EU to address the issue of just when waste, and in particular recovered metal, ceases to be waste, and as a result is no longer subject to waste regulations, with the benefits this can offer for exporting materials.
The potential to define Europe-wide end-of-waste criteria was included within the revised EU Waste Framework Directive, which was published in November 2008 (see letsrecycle.com story), and an EC research body began work on potential criteria earlier this year (see letsrecycle.com story) .
Impact
However, Mr Hetherington claimed that it was not yet possible to gauge exactly what impact and benefit the potential regulations would offer for metals recyclers.
He explained that the BMRA did plan to run an impact assessment to quantify the benefits to the metal recycling sector but could not do so until the criteria were finalised, though he said that “there'll clearly be an administrative benefit”.
He added: “At the moment, until the information is made available it's very difficult to know what benefits they'll be.”
Copper
Mr Hetherington also revealed that the next metal the Commission was set to examine was copper, explaining that, if the EC's programme was followed, it “will come after the report in September.”
Claiming that “the Commission have taken aluminium and ferrous metals as pilots for all other metals,” he added that “we have made the case that all metals after that could go through on a single work stream”.
Subscribe for free