International legislation

The Basel Convention works with international regulations for transboundary movements of wastes and their disposal. For the moment, work is being done in order to prepare international recommendations for the ESM (environmentally sound management) of used tyres. The draft guidelines can be downloaded from the Basel Convention website: http://www.basel.int/techmatters/utyres/guidelines/30-11-2008.doc

The intersessional working group has a member from Genan, providing information about the recycling technology and applications from the world’s largest tyre recycler. You can see the composition of the intersessional working group here: http://www.basel.int/techmatters/utyres/siwg-mebers.doc

Parties have been commenting on the draft technical guidelines, among these Genan has submitted a set of comments and recommendations which can be downloaded from here: http://www.basel.int/techmatters/code/comments.php?guidId=65

It is the policy of Genan to work for the best possible guidelines from the environmentally point of view.  This means that the waste hierarchy must be observed so that recycling is preferential to incineration and civil engineering applications and that scrap tyres should not be exported from rich to less developed countries leaving the latter with an unproportional waste problem.

The EU has for a long time been aware of the importance of proper regulation for the disposal of scrap tyres. Already in 1999, the first directive was implemented banning the landfill of scrap tyres. It has now been in force for some years and the problem with landfill of tyres in the EU is now virtually solved.

In year 2000 the EU made a new directive concerning the incineration of waste trying to reduce the emissions from e.g. cement plants using scrap tyres as fuel.

And quite recently, EU has implemented directive 2008/98 sustaining the waste hierarchy principle that recycling is more beneficial than incineration or backfilling uses like civil engineering applications.