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BUYLINES
Reduce, Re-use, Recycle ... Or Else!
By Samuel Tulip
China, we read, is about to overtake the United Kingdom on the value of her manufactured exports. This will have surprised the chattering classes, who gave up on British industry some twenty years ago, and have since conducted policy and debate on the assumption that our manufacturing industry is about as significant in global terms as that of Vanuatu or Kiribati (look them up; I did!).
An amusing side-effect has been that the UK, and for that matter most of the developed West, is thus able to take money off China through the export of raw materials - or more precisely, scrap steel - and this trend has the natural protectionists in the European Union sharpening their pencils in anticipation. The UK is the second largest exporter of scrap (after the U.S.) and even though Corus, an Anglo-Dutch metals firm which owns 90 per cent of UK steel capacity, maintains there is quite enough scrap steel remaining in Europe to satisfy most needs, the calls for quota schemes and export licensing regimes are strident.
I am amazed that we haven't got such regimes already. Shifting anything that could be deemed to be 'scrap' or 'waste' in Europe is almost impossible, and the regulations take little account of the fact that one man's waste product can be (and in a sustainable economy ought to be) another man's raw material.
Good Intentions?
To give some examples: the growing volume of law on 'end of life' consumer goods is rapidly wiping out entire industries devoted to refurbishing equipment for resale in less fashion-conscious territories. We used to take refrigerators, replace the ozone-depleting gases, do them up and sell them into the Third World, which badly needs them (for example to preserve drugs and vaccines). But the rules now say that not only the gases, but all the blown insulation, must be replaced: venture rendered uneconomic, and fridges by the million are sitting on disused airfields waiting for someone to subsidize a stripping process that will allow them to go to landfill (so very eco-friendly; and meanwhile the Freon is gently wafting into the atmosphere anyway). The same 'principles' will soon be applied to all manner of electronic and electrical goods. It used to be that old mobiles never died - they went to those Pacific islands (have you found them on the map yet?) I mentioned earlier: soon, they will merely moulder in warehouses until someone can figure out a way to subsidize the recovery of trace heavy metals.
Copper scrap and waste (the rules don't differentiate) is another. As for old ships, don't go there. Abel, a UK company, bought a dozen or so life-expired transports from the US Navy a year or two back, with the intention of dismantling them responsibly in Hartlepool - a town in the somewhat depressed Northeast of England with a long tradition of ship building and ship breaking. Of course, there are some nasties such as asbestos, contaminated bilge oil and the like - what do you expect in a fifty-year-old ship? - but here was a chance to break them using a skilled and trained workforce, in a town that needs the jobs and under the strictest of regulation.
But no. The tree-huggers got the planning permissions (needed to build bunds to contain any spillage) overturned, on the amusing grounds that a ship is not a 'marine structure' - I should have noted that Abel has been breaking oil rigs quite happily with nary a complaint. Guess what will happen now (as indeed has happened to similar vessels from the Royal Navy's Fleet Auxiliary)? The hulks will be traded in the market, probably to Germany first, then to Turkey, and will end up beached on an Indian shore being torn apart almost bare-handed by small children.
One Man's Trash
From the big to the trivial. A newspaper reported recently that a retired businessman had received a Summons for flouting the Waste Disposal Regulations. His offence? He helps his son-in-law run a business, sometimes takes paperwork home, and occasionally puts this into his domestic refuse stream (a.k.a. the trashcan). Some eagle-eyed jobsworth spotted this and the sky fell in. You see, it's "business waste." To dispose of business waste you must use an approved contractor (at a price). For every 'consignment' you need a Consignment Note, specifying the content, any hazards, disposal method and site, and so on, in triplicate. You're supposed to file a copy with the authorities before the contractor comes, and you're responsible for the destination - so you'd better take insurance against the 'approved contractor' just dumping the stuff in the woods.
The prosecution has in fact been withdrawn, but that is the system we are up against. Almost any business disposal is a legal and bureaucratic nightmare (you can't even give a redundant desk-lamp to a charity shop); sensible and sustainable re-use is almost impossible; valuable input materials are classified as 'waste', and so, of course, wasted. And 'the people', their elected representatives, and the many less obviously elected Non-Governmental Organizations demand ever greater 'Corporate Social Responsibility.' I doubt most businesspeople spend their drive-time plotting to destroy the planet, but if I had to face this stuff every day I think I'd be tempted!
Samuel Tulip is a U.K.-based journalist who reports on the European Union.
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