New guidelines on the exporting of recyclables published

Earlier this year Leeds city council and its contractor Cutts Bros were investigated by the Agency over the sending of unsorted household recyclables to Malaysia.

Leeds city council was cleared in February over the possibility that it was failing to properly ensure that it was fully complying with duty of care regulations covering the export of recyclables which could be counted as waste under shipment legislation, (see letsrecycle.com story).

Now, the Agency has said that it is to take no further action against Cutts Bros over the matter. When the issue was first raised, Leeds decided to stop sending the material abroad and to keep it for recycling in the UK.

The case centred on whether materials sent abroad for recycling had contamination to a level where they might be deemed as household waste and so require stricter controls.

The Agency has recently published a set of guidelinescovering the export of recyclables.
So far the guidelines are not “law”, but because they come from the Agency it is now likely that industry will need to look at them before deciding on the export of unsorted material.
The Agency said it considers it likely that in the majority of cases, unsorted
recyclable waste will, for the purposes of the Waste Shipments Regulation,
be considered to be “Municipal/Household waste'.

Green List

Under transfrontier shipment rules, which govern the exports of wastes and recyclables, material falls into a green, amber or red category. Green list material can move relatively freely, with most non-OECD states (such as India and Malaysia) specifying the green list waste categories they are prepared to import for recovery and the controls applicable to such imports. Many non-OECD states have imposed different levels of control on amber and red list waste categories.

The Agency said that normal commercial controls will only be applicable to kerbside collected recyclables in circumstances where it can be demonstrated that the waste stream concerned does not fall within the Municipal/Household classification. This is likely to be restricted to shipments of homogenous loads of waste comprising waste in a single green list category. An example could be separately collected waste paper, uncontaminated by other waste types.

Tony Gubby, Agency technical manager for hazardous waste, told letsrecycle.com that generally the export of mixed recyclables would usually be “OK as long as the receiving country, the competent authority, is OK with this and it meets shipment rules.”

Contamination

Mr Gubby said that mixed materials with some contamination are not counted as green. Instead they are likely to fall into the amber category. “They are likely to be classified as municipal waste, and most likely to be notified to the authorities as municipal waste.”

He explained that the categorisation will come down to the degree of sorting within the UK and the mix of recyclables, especially where plastics are concerned. “To be green list waste there will have to be a pretty rigid segregation of procedure.”

Mr Gubby declined to say whether any investigations were currently underway by the Agency over any other exports of mixed waste but said: “The Agency will always investigate where illegal movements are suspected.”

But, he reassured industry and local authorities that there should not be a problem “where there is legitimate trade notified to us in accordance with the regulations.”