The Basel Convention controls the movement of hazardous and certain other wastes between countries through a system of prior informed consent. Clean metal scrap is largely outside it; e-waste, batteries, lead-bearing and contaminated scrap are inside it.
The Basel Convention controls the movement of hazardous and certain other wastes between countries through a system of prior informed consent. Clean metal scrap is largely outside it; e-waste, batteries, lead-bearing and contaminated scrap are inside it.
Basel is a United Nations treaty, with almost every country a party, that governs the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes and other wastes. Its mechanism is prior informed consent: the exporting country must notify the importing country (and any transit country), and the movement may proceed only after written consent. A waste that cannot be managed in an environmentally sound way at the destination should not be sent, and the exporter must take it back if the shipment fails. The convention also lets parties ban imports altogether and respects regional agreements that go further.
Each party applies the convention through its own law — the EU through the Waste Shipment Regulation, India through its hazardous and other wastes rules, and so on — so the practical procedure differs by country even though the principle is the same.
The convention’s annexes list wastes that are presumed hazardous and wastes that are not. Clean, uncontaminated metal scrap of iron, steel, copper, aluminium, zinc, nickel and their alloys is on the non-hazardous list and can generally move without notification, subject to national rules. The hazardous side includes lead-acid batteries, lead-bearing residues and cable sheathing, zinc and aluminium dross and ash in some forms, e-waste and printed circuit boards, catalytic-converter residues, scrap contaminated with oil, PCBs, asbestos or chemicals, and mixtures that cannot be separated. Amendments adopted in recent years have brought more e-waste and mixed plastics within the notification regime.
A trader in e-waste, batteries, dross or contaminated scrap needs licensed sender and receiver, notification and consent, insurance or a financial guarantee, and a movement document travelling with the shipment. The approvals take weeks to months. Shipping such material as “metal scrap” on a green-list document is the commonest offence prosecuted in the trade, and containers found to contain hazardous material are returned at the shipper’s cost. The OECD runs a parallel, somewhat lighter system for movements between its members.