Page 8 from: April 2005
N E W S
Metal recycling company S. Norton
& Co of Liverpool, UK, has demon-
strated its handling prowess by tak-
ing only a little over 24 hours to load
nearly 35 000 tonnes of fragmentised
steel on board a vessel bound for India.
The actual loading time for the 34
648 tonnes loaded on to MV ‘Gokcan’
was 27 hours 45 minutes, including
normal clean-up operations to make
the vessel ready to sail. Norton’s
Export Director Charlie Norton com-
ments: ‘We are not sure if this is a
record or not, but we know it’s very
fast. We had to catch the tide and we
did it. Vessel turn-round times are
extremely important to our cus-
tomers, as they affect the value of the
cargoes and the cost of getting them
to their destinations.’
Norton’s substantial export
achievements were recognised last
year when it secured a Queen’s
Award for International Trade.
Rapid scrap turn-round
at S. Norton
Sims opens deep-sea
export terminal in the UK
Australian scrap giant Sims Group
has opened a new deep-sea dock facil-
ity in the UK to handle exports to
Asia, Spain and Turkey. The new
facility, at the Queen Elizabeth
Docks in Hull, can load vessels with
capacities of up to 30 000 tonnes.
The fourth such facility to be
unveiled by Sims Group in the UK,
the site has a rail link for transport-
ing scrap from the company shred-
der in Nottingham. Previously, the
material sent to Hull had been
transported either to the company’s
Newport facility in South Wales.
Meanwhile, Sims Group Ltd and
environmental services business
Collex Pty Ltd are to introduce
Australia’s first computer and elec-
tronics recycling initiative which will
establish an e-waste recycling net-
work throughout the country. The
Sims/Collex recycling project will
lead to the recovery of metals, circuit
boards, plastics and CRT glass.
Coinciding with the launch, Sims
and Collex are providing free drop-
off facilities at various locations for
electronic equipment.
Last October, Sims acquired
Netherlands-based Mirec, Europe’s
largest electronics and IT equipment
recycler. This gave the group a spread
of operations in several European
countries, as well as access to latest
recycling techniques.
* VDM
Hans Münster, Managing Director and
Chairman of VDM, the German Association
of Metal Traders, celebrated 30 years with
the organisation on April 1. Starting at VDM
in 1975, he has been Managing Director for
the last 28 years. Mr Münster is also a board
member of the European metals recycling
association Eurometrec and for many years has been a board member of
the Non-Ferrous Metal Division of world recycling organisation BIR.
www.metallhandel-online.com
People
EU urged to rethink the
waste hierarchy
A group of economists brought
together by Denmark’s Environmen-
tal Assessment Institute (EAI) has
called on the EU to rethink its appli-
cation of the waste hierarchy. The
bloc places too much emphasis on
recycling and recycling targets, the
institute argued following a seminar
at its Copenhagen offices.
Developed in the 1970s, the waste
hierarchy gives top priority to source
reduction (waste prevention), fol-
lowed in order by reuse, recycling
(plus composting), incineration and
finally landfill. EAI’s claim that the
EU is putting too much emphasis on
material recycling echoes the argu-
ments of Europe’s incineration indus-
try, which maintains that waste-to-
energy is ‘environmentally competi-
tive’ with recycling. EAI is calling for
the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA)
as the key tool in prioritising between
waste management options. CBA
suggests that, in many cases, waste-
to-energy should actually be placed
below landfill. Similar suggestions
have been made before, notably in a
study carried out for the European
Commission in the 1990s.
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