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The European Waste and Resource Management Industry Association FEAD is calling on the Conference on sustainable, innovative and socially responsible public procurement being held in Paris on 2 June to demand European Commission guidelines for Member States to ensure proper implementation of the EU Public Procurement Package.

More than 200 waste-to-energy (WtE) plants are operating in China nowadays. One of them in the City of Lianyungang, Shandong Province north of Shanghai, will be complemented by a pre-treatment plant for municipal solid waste (MSW). The Austrian-German technology firm Redwave designed the process of the entire plant.

The widespread closure of induction furnaces in China had helped to prompt flows of displaced steel scrap to India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – despite the country’s 40% export duty, it was reported to the BIR Ferrous Division meeting in Hong Kong on May 23 by board member Tom Bird of Liberty Steel in the UK.

Although more than 90 separate pieces of research have concluded no risks are attached to the use of crumb rubber in synthetic turf, the issue “is not going away” and will not do so until “a definitive study” has been published, according to Robin Wiener, President of the US Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.

Taking the five- to 10-year view, it was possible that China would decide to stop importing plastic scrap. That was the worst-case scenario presented by the Executive President of the China Scrap Plastics Association – Dr Steve Wong- in light of the country’s National Sword initiative to prohibit imports of any material that could contain contaminants and therefore lead to environmental pollution.

Manufacturers should receive no exemptions that allow them to market goods containing persistent organic pollutants (POPs) unless they have first made financial provision for end-of-life environmentally sound management (ESM), it is argued in a draft position formulated by BIR and aimed at Parties to the Stockholm Convention on POPs.

The next congress in battery recycling ICBR 2017 organized by ICM AG will be held from September 20 – 22, 2017 in the Sheraton Lisboa Hotel & Spa in Lisbon, Portugal.

Improved prices at the start of 2017 had led to a healthy availability of stainless steel scrap – but “these positive conditions were not to last”. There had been a subsequent downward correction in nickel and stainless scrap values such that flows of the latter had slowed, explained Jonathan Bower of UK-based ELG Haniel Metals.

China’s reform of its scrap import regime will have potentially far-reaching consequences for the non-ferrous metals sector, the latest divisional meeting was warned by Ma Hongchang, BIR’s advisor on the country’s policy and regulatory developments. It was even possible, he told delegates in Hong Kong on May 22, that the Chinese government would go as far as to ban imports of certain items of mixed metal scrap.

One of the main challenges currently facing the global recycling industry is “the increasing burden of legislative controls that does not help in the promotion of a smooth and efficient system of waste collection, segregation and transportation of recyclables,” BIR World President Ranjit Baxi of J&H Sales International has insisted.

World crude steel production for the 67 countries reporting to the World Steel Association (Worldsteel) was 142.1 million tonnes (Mt) in April 2017, a 5.0% increase compared to April 2016.