ANNEX
BETTER REGULATION—EU
GOLD PLATING
The Definition of Waste
We are concerned at differences of interpretation
across EU member states with regards to the Definition of wastes.
Including; Waste shipment regulations (Transfrontier Shipment
of waste regulations (TFS)(1994)) and the Waste Incineration directive.
This affects a wide range of chemical manufacturing businesses.
It has led to differing practices between member
states on the question of when a waste ceases to be a waste and
becomes a resource once more. Consequently this has led to certain
materials being classified as hazardous waste in one member state
whereas in another member state, the material may not even be
defined as a waste at all. In the UK chemicals industry, the impact
of this lack of clarity and lack of level playing field is having
a marked effect on a number of manufacturing sites.
For example one of our members has reported
that his site has to comply with the EU Waste shipment regulations
(Transfrontier Shipment of waste regulations (TFS)(1994)) in order
to export a material produced on site and that will be directly
used as a raw material in another chemical process in Belgium.
This arises from the fact that the Environment Agency has categorised
this material as "waste'. Compliance with TFS requires the
producer to send notifications of shipments of waste to the competent
national Authorities, which have then to approve it, prior shipment.
In England and Wales this procedure incurs a substantial fee for
the exporter coupled with a delay for process by the EA that can
last up to three months. We have evidence that the same material
produced under similar conditions in France is not categorised
as waste by the French Authorities and hence the producer does
not have to comply with the EU Waste shipment regulations in order
to export the material to Belgium.
Another example relates to compliance with the
Waste Incineration directive (WID). One of our members operates
a process producing a well-characterised single waste stream that
can be recycled to produce the raw material for the main process.
The recycling operation, which is proven environmentally and economically
sustainable, includes an incineration step. Article 11 of the
Council directive 91/156/EEC amending 75/442/EEC (WID) states
that installations that carry out waste recovery in accordance
with article 4 (not endangering human health and the environment)
are exempted from the Directive. The regulators first agreed that
the recycling operation falls under this description and therefore
should be exempted from WID. However Defra did not retained this
interpretation and concluded that because the recycling operation
includes an irreversible molecular change to the waste stream
then WID would apply to the thermal treatment stage of the process.
In this particular example it should be noted that 99.6% of the
whole process is reversible as the incineration product is recovered
and converted it back into its pure form for re-use. With this
in mind it is also worth mentioning that DEFRA allows certain
incinerators to be exempt from WID where there is incomplete destruction
of the waste stream but the waste stream does not undergo any
chemical change at any stage. The fact that subsequent processing
is able to re-form a large proportion of the waste stream into
a useful product was not considered by DEFRA as a criteria for
exemption while processes such as swarf driers, where the swarf
is heated to a temperature that burns off oil contaminants leaving
the swarf "product" for reuse and, burning activated
carbon containing VOCs where the VOCs get burnt to leave a VOC
free activated carbon product for reuse are exempted under the
basis that the waste stream does not undergo any chemical change
at any stage.
29 September 2006
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