Scrap Ambassador—Francis Veys?

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007

Francis Veys uses his leadership of the Bureau of International Recycling to promote and protect the scrap recycling industry around the world.

BY KENT KISER 

Fly around the world to meet with government officials and industry leaders. Interact with delegates in various languages—speaking three fluently—to discuss trends and pending regulation. Work 10-hour days and spend your spare time reading about international topics and watching international news networks such as CNN and BBC. What sounds like the job description of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is actually the work of Francis Veys, director general of the Bureau of International Recycling, a Brussels-based trade association with members in 60 countries. As an ambassador for the global scrap recycling industry, Veys has spent his 32-year BIR career facilitating the industry’s international growth and cooperation.

International affairs is Veys’ passion as well as his work. “I’m very much international-minded,” he says. “I’m not interested in what is happening in my own garden.” His upbringing might have something to do with that: He was born and raised in Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where his father served in the colonial government. Veys has fond memories of his childhood in Congo. To this day, he says, he recalls the colors, smells, and sounds of that country and can understand Lingala, Congo’s main language, even though he left the country in 1958, when he was 10, so he could attend boarding school in Brussels.

Veys pursued his international interests in college, earning degrees in economics and international and European Union law at the Catholic University of Leuven in Leuven, Belgium. After graduating, he returned to Brussels and worked in a law office for a couple of years before accepting a position with a trade group for European textile manufacturers. When an opportunity at a different trade association became available, Veys recalls being intrigued by the group’s name—it was then the Bureau International de la Récupération—though he admits that he knew nothing about scrap or recycling. “I wasn’t particularly interested in the topic,” he says. “I thought BIR would be another place to get some training before moving to another association.”

Veys joined BIR in 1975 as assistant to secretary general Marcel Doisy. At the time, the organization had a staff of five, which meant everyone did “a bit of everything,” he says. He laughs when he recalls the technological limitations of the 1970s: no computers, no faxes (only telexes), no office copier. Everything had to be done by hand. At times, he wondered if he was putting his law degree to best use.

Around 1980, Veys started working closely with BIR sister associations EFR (the European Ferrous Recovery and Recycling Federation) and Euro­metrec (the European Metal Trade and Recycling Federation), which represented ferrous and nonferrous scrap companies, respectively, in European member states and which the BIR secretariat managed from its Brussels offices. Through this work, he says, he became “progressively more knowledgeable about the European and international recycling businesses.” The more he learned, the more he liked the industry and felt committed to protecting and promoting it.

When Doisy retired in 1981, BIR’s board asked Veys—just 33 at the time—to assume the post. Though he felt too young to take on that responsibility, he accepted and was “quite excited to do it,” he says. He had no way of knowing, of course, that he had just embarked on his life’s work, a position he would fill for more than a quarter-century.

Growing and Managing

In his early days as BIR’s secretary general, Veys and his staff spent much of their time communicating with members and organizing the group’s two annual meetings. Those tasks still take a lot of time, but the association’s scope of work is much broader today.

One reason is that BIR is a more international organization, which Veys says he considers one of the association’s greatest accomplishments. When he started in 1975, BIR had members from 20 countries, mostly in Europe, whereas today it has members in more than 60 countries all over the world. This increasingly global membership has made BIR broaden its scope far beyond European issues and placed greater demands on the association to serve its culturally and geographically diverse members.

“Our focus is on international business,” Veys says. “Any actions we take—whether it’s organizing meetings, looking at legislation, or meeting with government authorities—are in the interests of all companies that trade internationally, not just European firms.”
BIR’s global reach also has forced Veys and his staff to traverse the globe to address scrap-related legislative, regulatory, and business developments wherever they arise. About 15 years ago, for instance, Veys participated in a U.N. meeting in Geneva where delegates were considering a complete ban on exports of waste (which they defined to include scrap) under the Basel Convention, which controls the transboundary shipment of hazardous material between ratifying parties. “If [the scrap] industry was not there, I’m sure they would have voted for some type of ban,” he says. “We fortunately stopped that from happening.”

Veys recalls other meetings with similarly high stakes, including a Paris gathering in which the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development created the green, amber, and red material lists that govern “waste” shipments between member countries under the Basel Convention. Basel was also the subject of a pivotal meeting in China about 12 years ago, when Veys sat down with China’s environmental and customs agencies plus four Chinese recycling associations to discuss the country’s material lists.

In addition to growing more international, BIR has become larger, doubling its membership in the past 10 years to more than 700 companies and federations. Veys says he is particularly proud of that accomplishment because the association does not accept all applicants. “We are very tough, and the rules to join BIR are getting stricter and stricter,” he says. “We do not just take people because they want to join.” Prospective members must sign BIR’s code of conduct, which requires them to be responsible operators based on specific criteria, and they must abide by those standards throughout their membership. “If they fail to do that, then we reject them,” he says.

Keeping up with the association’s steeper workload isn’t easy, but Veys—whose title changed to director general in 1997—and his current staff of seven somehow manage it all. His primary responsibility, he says, is coordinating the internal and external operations of the association. One way he does this is by limiting the entire staff to a single e-mail address. Though that might seem inefficient—even controlling—to some, Veys says that it ensures that everyone in the BIR office knows what’s happening at all times and acknowledges incoming messages—about one per minute, he says—and that the appropriate staff person answers the message promptly.

Beyond his coordinating duties, Veys’ responsibilities are typical for an association executive: prepare budgets, travel, organize and follow up on meetings, meet with government authorities, respond to members, monitor pertinent regulations and legislation, and much more. No wonder Veys works a 10-hour day, on average, taking only a 15-minute lunch break to scan the newspaper and eat an apple.

Advocating for Recycling

Veys is proud of BIR’s international reach, but he admits that some still view it as a European organization—in part because it is based in Brussels, home of the European Commission. “I think this image is changing,” he says optimistically, “but it will still take time.” The truth, he notes, is that  European companies constitute only about half of BIR’s membership today.  

That said, there’s no denying that Veys and the rest of the BIR team spend a lot of time walking the halls of the EC and meeting with various European authorities—and for good reason. In the past decade, the EC has imposed several directives that have had a significant impact on the scrap recycling industry in the European Union. The most notable of these laws apply to end-of-life vehicles and electronic products—the so-called ELV and WEEE directives. “Each year we are facing new legislation, either new drafts or new implementation—it’s always going a bit further,” he says.
Veys sees good and bad in the EU directives. On the positive side, he says, “these directives have helped to officially recognize the existence of our sector. They also have forced some companies to handle their materials in a better, more environmental way. That is good. They have forced people to think.”

The danger, Veys says, is that EU rules occasionally go too far. For one, he notes, recyclers are already achieving some of the recycling rates the directives require, but “it is extremely difficult to technically, scientifically demonstrate that a country or a region is reaching, say, a 75-percent collection rate, recovery rate, or recycling rate of a specific type of scrap.”

Veys points to the latest EU Waste Shipment Regulation, adopted in 2006 and implemented this July, as another potential obstacle. Though its goal was to simplify earlier regulations, “the EU has made it tougher in some cases” to ship scrap, he says. According to the new regulations, scrap shippers must now fill out a form that lists all parties involved in the movement of the shipped material. That form is available to the buyer, and it could reveal the seller’s suppliers—which is usually confidential information. BIR met with EU officials several times to address the confidentiality issue—unfortunately, to no avail, Veys says—and helped disseminate information about the regulation among national recycling associations and government authorities.

The revised regulation applies to shipments within the EU as well as to scrap imported into the EU—including shipments from the United States—and exports to countries that are not part of the OECD. “So it’s not just something going on in Europe, it affects the world market,” Veys says, noting that this will remain a top-priority issue for BIR in the near term.

Most EU scrap regulations and directives are based on the EC’s definition of scrap materials as wastes rather than commodities—an erroneous definition that BIR has lobbied for decades to change. “We’re progressing on this issue, but it’s slow work,” Veys says. On the bright side, BIR’s EU sister federations promoted the insertion of an article in the new proposed framework directive on waste, which the EC should adopt by early next year, he says. The article recognizes the need to examine when material ceases to be waste and when material never becomes waste. What determines those conditions is a series of criteria, Veys explains, including the existence of a market for the material, the environmentally sound management of the material, and the fact that the material meets an accepted specification. “Meeting those criteria would mean that the material cannot be treated as a waste, but rather as a product, as a secondary raw material,” he says. To advance this distinction, BIR held an international symposium in 1999 that examined when waste ceases to be waste. And in the EU, BIR’s EU sister federations have “had three major EC meetings where we were able to present our case” and have taken EU representatives on tours of scrap operations to show how scrap is processed into marketable commodities.

This effort, which would be a breakthrough, is “going well,” Veys says, expressing cautious optimism that the EC will eventually define scrap as a commodity, not a waste. “I think it will happen, but it may take another five years,” he says.

Ironically, the EU’s inclusion of scrap in the definition of waste has actually worked in recyclers’ favor regarding Europe’s new Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals, or REACH, regulation, which took effect June 1. The regulation aims to protect human health and the environment through improved identification of chemicals that are produced by, imported into, or used in products made in Europe. REACH “should not affect scrap at all as long as it is considered and regulated as waste because waste is out of the REACH framework,” Veys explains. If processed scrap is redefined as a product, however, it will fall under the REACH regulation. The recycling industry’s challenge is to get processed scrap classified as a product so it is outside the scope of the waste regulations and also to get it outside the scope of REACH when it becomes a product.  The latter goal may be achieved, in part, by recognizing that the material will have passed through REACH in its first life and that it is an “intermediate” in REACH terms when it is shipped to a consuming facility in its next lifecycle step.

Next Steps

Though he’s only 59—and looks younger—Veys has spent more than half of his life at BIR and now has an eye on retirement and succession plans to ease the association’s leadership transition. “I have told BIR’s new president, Dominique Maguin, that I will help him through his presidency for the next four years,” Veys says. “In a couple of years, I may start looking for my successor. It will be time to think about somebody to take it over. And then if BIR still needs me for anything, I will be at the association’s disposal.” He’s ready to spend more time with his family—wife Bernadette and grown children Michael and Florence—and work on his tennis game.

Despite his talk of succession planning, Veys remains 100-percent focused on the job. There’s plenty of work to do, he says, both within BIR and in the industry as a whole. For instance, he would love to grow BIR to 1,000 members. The greatest growth potential lies in emerging and developing regions such as Asia and Eastern Europe, he says. As BIR recruits companies from those regions, it is equally interested in encouraging them to form national associations to represent their interests—and become BIR members themselves. “Individual company memberships are fine, but it’s not enough,” Veys says. “There must be a body from the country representing the whole trade.” And BIR is happy to lend its knowledge and connections to help new national associations get off the ground.

BIR also faces the ongoing challenge of educating the public, the media, government officials, and other sectors about the scrap industry and its contributions. “We must continue telling everyone that what we do is really good for the world environment and not just for individual countries,” Veys says. The need for ongoing communication also applies within BIR, as the association must work to make sure its members are “rightly informed and know how to act,” he adds. For instance, BIR has created many resources over the years—such as a Guide to Radioactivity, Tools for Environmentally Sound Management, and commodity-specific newsletters—to help its members succeed.

What else does Veys have on his to-do list? He would like to establish a greater exchange of information among countries. The problem now, he says, is that each country often develops its own solutions to common problems. This can complicate the global business picture and create an uneven playing field for companies involved in international trade. For example, some countries use their waste management regulations—which include scrap—for protectionist purposes, such as by prohibiting imports of “waste” textiles to protect their domestic textile market. “Such legislation is getting stricter and stricter,” Veys says, “and it can wrongly affect trade.”

Within the scrap industry, Veys says there is a need for worldwide scrap specifications that would complement current country-specific specs. “We should try to sit together and have world standards,” he says. “We should seek some common, basic grades at the world level that would be recognized as standard scrap commodities.” Scrap consumers should be at the table during such discussions, he says. “I believe that too often the scrap industry has worked without much coordination with the steelworks, the paper mills, the foundries, and the smelters,” he says. “There are many reasons to work together.”

He also is looking ahead to BIR’s 60th anniversary next May—and his own 60th birthday next August—which he will celebrate with equal enthusiasm and a bit of reflection. Though he “came into this industry by luck,” he says, he truly found a home—and a career—representing the international scrap business. His job has given him “the chance to meet incredible people,” he says, and he has formed personal, lasting bonds with many in the business.

Veys says he is proud to have found a career in an industry that makes positive contributions to both the global economy and the environment. “Any industry that can combine business and environment is something exceptional,” he says. “I don’t think there are many other businesses or industries that can do that.”

Kent Kiser is publisher and editor-in-chief of Scrap.