Доклад об осуществлении решений, принятых Конференцией Сторон на ее шестом совещании

The title of this section and the content of paragraphs 34 and 35 have little to do with one another. What is needed here is an examination of how the Ban Amendment impacts waste minimization. We maintain that there is a strong correlation. Therefore we suggest the following paragraph.

New Paragraph for Section 8:

The ban, by closing off cheap and dirty options for waste management can force cost internalizations which in turn drive “green design” and thus hazardous waste minimization. One such example is found in the European Union which after ratifying and implementing the Basel Ban in 1997, was thereafter forbidden from exporting electronic wastes to weaker economies. As a result, the pressure to design for less toxics and recycling and enhanced collection became far more acute in Europe, in comparison to North America where a free trade in electronic wastes to non-Annex VII countries persists to this day. It is largely due to the closing-off of the export “escape hatch” that has pressed Europe into more rapidly adopting legislation to enhance European recycling of electronic waste and to phase-out toxic inputs to electronic products to ensure that such domestic recycling has less economic and environmental impacts within Europe.

VI.

Paras. 36 and 37. The pronouncements made in these paragraphs were more accurate for the period from the mid to the late 1990’s than with the realities of the new decade. For the most part the global privatization trend has dissipated, and in its wake lies the ruins of the failure of deregulation in crucial industries. What paragraph 36 misses out on is that with the new century there have been increasing efforts globally to ratchet up corporate responsibility for their products through legislation. At times this effort has been called extended producer responsibility, and has contributed to more environmentally sustainable designs of products and production processes. So far these trends are noticeable in Europe, China and Japan, e.g. with respect to take-back legislation with respect to automobiles and electronics. Further, para. 37 fails to mention that the advent of new sustainable designs ushers in less toxic secondary materials that can be recycled and used by rapidly industrializing countries without the accompanying pollution.

For the above reasons, we suggest the following modifications to paras. 36 and 37:

36. Since the mid-1990’s, there has been a gradual and significant policy shift in many countries, both Annex VII and non-Annex VII, away from a strong focus on regulation towards market driven opportunities. The deregulation trend has tapered down as failure in certain sectors covered by deregulation has become apparent. In the area of waste management, the new century has brought on a renewed focus on the polluter pays principle and its extension to post-consumer waste pollution – calling for manufacturer responsibility in the full life cycle management of their products or extended producer responsibility (EPR). One of the first applications of EPR was with automobiles, and now has captured one of the largest sources of post-consumer wastes – electronics. EPR provides a feedback mechanism that internalizes costs back to those first responsible for creating them. This mechanism leads to obvious economic incentives to drive cleaner production and greener products.

37. Rapidly industrializing countries have a growing demand for secondary raw materials to sustain the pace of their social and economic development. Unfortunately, in order fuel this growth these countries are forced to take in hazardous and other wastes together with the secondary raw materials that they require materials which in many instances need not be hazardous, and polluting were there more attention paid to hazardous use reductions upstream. In this context, there is a critical need for EPR as one tool to drive the development and application of environmentally sustainable designs of products and processes, and to build a capacity for the transfer of clean production technologies, and also for environmentally sound recovery or recycling of non-hazardous wastes.

Para. 38. There are key elements that are not mentioned in the future work, which we suggest should be included as new sub-paragraphs f and g:

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