Earlier this month, policy and industry experts came together for the Small Intercessional Working Group (SIWG) on Legal Clarity in Geneva, Switzerland.
The SIWG was asked to finalize a glossary of terms that directly impacts the industry and the Basel Convention. Terms included: recycling, recovery, reuse, repair, refurbishment, and waste v. non-waste. The recycling industry was represented by ReMA (Eric Harris) and the Bureau of International Recyclers (Ross Bartley). Many of these terms are currently not defined in the Basel Convention text. ReMA and BIR were able to hold off efforts by the European Union to define the scrap recycling industry as a “recovery” operation rather than a “recycling” operation. It is very important to stave off proposals that would define recyclers as “pre-processors” for politically-motivated reasons inside Europe rather than legally justifiable terms. The glossary will now move for consideration at the next Open Ended Working Group meeting in Nairobi, June 2016. For more information about this meeting please contact
Eric Harris.