Page 22 from: October 2007

Survey reveals
UK is ‘flushing
away’ waste

Over half the UK population has
admitted to flushing items down the
toilet instead of disposing of them in
the bin, a ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ study
has revealed. Flushed objects in-
clude rope, wood, razor blades, ciga-
rette stubs and sanitary products. In
47% of cases, hygiene was given as
the reason for adopting this particu-
lar disposal method.

The survey revealed that 22% of
people were concerned about the
smell of ‘messy’ items such as nap-
pies and were worried that their
children may try to retrieve them
from a bin. The anti-litter campaign
says that most people who confessed
to disposing of litter via the toilet
‘see it as a convenient way to dispose
of difficult items’.

Keep Britain Tidy notes that for-
eign household waste can block fil-
ter screens when it reaches the sew-
erage plant. In times of heavy rain-
fall, waste may be washed into
overflow pipes and end up in rivers
or seas, thereby posing a potentially
fatal threat to wildlife.

Barrie Clarke, Director of Com-
munication at Water UK, observes:
‘A blocked toilet isn’t at all funny
and a blocked sewer is even worse if
the neighbours are affected. It’s defi-
nitely in everybody’s interests to use
the loo for its real purpose. Water
and sewage companies have spent
an estimated £25 billion (US$ 50 bil-
lion/Euro 40 billion) since privatisa-
tion in 1989 on water quality and en-
vironmental programmes.’

Netherlands
tops EU paper
recycling
league

The Netherlands outstripped all
its EU counterparts in recycling 77%
of its recovered paper in 2005 com-
pared to 64% in 1998. The very high
recycling rate resulted mainly from
an excellent domestic paper collec-
tion system which yields recovered
paper of very high quality in inter-
national terms.

Dutch paper mills use more than
75% recovered paper in their produc-
tion processes.

Car recycling in
the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, registrations
relating to some 484 000 cars were
handed in last year: of these, 250
000 cars were exported and the re-
maining 234 000 were discarded as
end-of-life vehicles. Both figures
were lower than in 2005.

The 263 dismantler members of
the country’s ARN car recycling or-
ganisation environmentally recycled
209 500, or around 90%, of the dis-
carded vehicles. Most of the 250 000
exported cars were shipped to new
EU member states in Eastern Eu-
rope. The average age of a scrapped
car in the Netherlands increased
from 15.5 years in 2005 to 15.9 years
in 2006.

Trans-boundary
movement of
waste in Poland

Revised EU legislation on inter-
national shipments of waste came
into force on July 12. Poland is
bound by the provisions of the EU
Accession Treaty to treat any waste
material, irrespective of whether it
is neutral or extremely hazardous to
the environment, as a hazardous
waste material.

Since importation of scrap metal
into Poland involves significant time
and effort to complete the required
permit procedures, many foreign
companies prefer to establish co-op-
erative ventures within Poland to
take advantage of simpler Green
List procedures. In order to ship
scrap freely to Poland, scrap compa-
nies will have to wait until 2012 for
a transitional period to end.

The Polish Chamber of Commerce
and Industry of Scrap Metal Man-
agement – the organisation repre-
senting the country’s scrap sector –
has continued to call on representa-
tives of the Polish Parliament to look
objectively at the progressive defi-
ciency of raw material necessary for
domestic steel production.

Approval for
Sims/Adams
Steel deal

Sims Group Ltd has been notified
of the early termination of the wait-
ing period requirements of the US
Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Im-
provements Act, thus enabling the
merger of its Southern Californian
Metal Recycling assets with those of
Adams Steel LLC to proceed.

The proposed joint venture com-
pany – SA Recycling LLC – will oper-
ate within a territory encompassing
Southern California, Arizona,
Southern Nevada and Northern
Mexico. It will combine Sims’ deep-
water facility at the Port of Los An-
geles with Adams Steel’s two inland
shredding operations and extensive
network of inland feeder yards.

Dow Jones
expands Paper
Stock Index

Dow Jones Indexes has launched
seven new recovered papers indices –
one for each US region participating
in physical transactions of OCC 11
grade corrugated paper.

The Dow Jones Midwest OCC 11
Index, the first index in the series,

A mag a zine for the recy cling indus try is pub lished in
many coun tries. Although these pub li ca tions main ly
cover news of the domes tic mar kets, many of them also
sig nal inter na tion al trends. Recycling International
rounds-up items from these mag a zines which are of
inter est to the inter na tion al recy cling indus try.

The mag a zines we co-oper ate with in pub lish ing
extracts from their edi to ri al pages are:
• Scrap (USA)
• Recycling Today (USA)
• Recycling mag a zin (Germany)
• Magazine Recycling Benelux (The Netherlands/Belgium)
• Recy cling & Waste World (UK)
• Recykling Poland

R O U N D U P

Magazine Round Up

www.mrb-uit gev ers.nl

www.recy cling wasteworld.co.uk

www.recy cling to day.com

www.abrys.pl

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