In a speech to tyre industry executives at the NTDA annual dinner last week, Mr Rowlands warned about the difficulties ahead as the UK looks to cope with the demands of the Landfill Directive. From this July, the landfilling of whole tyres will be banned and the landfilling of shredded tyres will be banned from July 2006.
The government is currently carrying out the second stage of its consultation on new tyre disposal producer responsibility regulations. The tyre industry is currently in talks as to how to respond to the DTI's consultation paper before the June 6 2003 deadline.
Speaking at the annual dinner, which coincided with Commercial Vehicle Show in Birmingham, the NTDA chairman said: “We have some major challenges to confront as retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers.”
Mr Rowlands explained: “Our wholesale members who import tyres will be one of the largest obliged parties under the proposed new regulations. We will have to provide them with solutions to comply with the new reporting regime, which will inevitably be one of the outcomes of the consultation process.”
“With the imminent onset of producer responsibility we must now work with manufacturers to arrive at a fair and equitable solution to this problem – one that embraces everyone in the supply chain and cascades responsibility to the entire Industry.”
Costs
The tyre industry called for a statutory requirement to place responsibility on all tyre producers equally during the government's first consultation, in 2002. This was because it believed producer companies that escaped the costs would gain “significant competitive advantage over those that bear them”. The typical cost of disposal is said to be about 70 pence per car tyre.
However, the government rejected the industry response earlier this month (see letsrecycle.com story), because it would prefer to see a largely voluntary system of producer responsibility. This is because it sees an improved version of the voluntary system already in place – the Tyre Industry Council's Responsible Recycler scheme – as providing flexibility in meeting the Landfill Directive's demands.
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