Good day Recyclers and Friends
Already the 2nd month of the new year and all seems fine… It sounds like demand is picking up, especially for the better quality materials. May 2017 be a great and super year for Plastics Recycling!
Recyclers are up and running except for those in municipalities that owe money to Eskom. Never a dull moment. Some industry news and updates for your information. Please scan through this and make notes of the relevant bits and pieces. If you need more information, please shout.
DUBAI 2016
SAPRO presented “Recycling in South Africa” at two international conferences in Dubai in early December. The first was organised by AMI, London, Plastics in Africa. About 50 delegates from mainly Europe attended this one-day conference. The topic of Sustainable plastics surfaced through-out the day. My presentation was the last of the day but still generated considerable interest and discussion afterwards.
Recycling Confex was a two day seminar organised out of India and covered all the material streams. I attended day 2 where Plastics, E-waste and Paper featured. Attendance was close to 100 delegates mainly from North Africa and the Middle East. Securing incoming materials streams and finding markets were the two main topics through out the morning. Many delegates wanted to talk afterwards to find out how we manage to secure such high percentages on an ongoing basis. We have also been invited to the 6th Bureau of Middle East Recycling International Conference on the 5th of March in Dubai again.
PLASTICS RECYCLING 2017
Talking about recycling conferences – there are many of them coming up. One that may be worthwhile attending is Plastics Recycling 2017 in New Orleans from the 6th to the 8th of March. More information
INCREASED RECYCLING RATES
A number of reports on this topic have crossED my desk in the last couple of days. There are international concerns raised about relatively low recycling rates for plastics. One article that spells it out clearly is the one from Resource Recycling: “It calls for changes in packaging design, including the materials and additives used, as well as the formats.” Read the full article It links with SAPRO’s concerns on high CaCO3 levels in traditional recyclable products like PP furniture, buckets and flexible films.
FILLER LEVELS
Extraordinary high levels of fillers find their way into plastics components – mainly cost driven. This impacts on the use of virgin, and recycled content. In most cases levels of additives have risen to such AN extent that these products no longer float during the recycling process and plastics flakes are now sinking together with the mud, paper and other unrecyclable polymer component. SAPRO is part of a working group with some converters to try and find a way around this. It may mean drastic changes to the traditional sink/float settling tanks, or the development of additives that will reduce the density levels or serious regulation that ban the use of high levels of fillers. This task team gave themselves 6 months to come up with some workable solutions. The SAPRO board is fully represented on the working group.
SAPRO BOARD
The SAPRO AGM in August elected a much smaller SAPRO Board than in the previous years. The current Board consists of: Rudi Johannes from Polymark Recycling (Chairman), Johann Conradie from Myplas (Vice Chairman), Douglas Greig from Tuffy Manufacturing, Fred Cheetham from Atlantic Plastics and myself as scribe, bottle washer and cook. Rudi agreed to be Chairman for an interim period till the election of a new Board at the AGM in August 2017.
REGULATORY ISSUES
A couple of issues are featuring at the moment. Government has call for a Packaging and Paper Integrated Industry Waste Plan and the plastics recyclers work with the Packaging SA team to come up with a workable solution. They have asked for some extension to the initial 6 months in which such a plan needs to be developed. As a start, all packaging producers should belong to one of the Extended Producer Organisations, e.g. PETCO, PolyCo, PSPC or SAVA. Packaging SA asked the EPOs to develop their own plans and together with the Paper, Glass and Metal packaging sectors it will then be combined in a single P&P IWMP.
In the meantime, the Department of Environmental Affairs has published an intent to regulate the registration of waste transporters on the Waste Information System. SAPRO sent a response and asked to interact with them as well. We will wait and see.
• Waste Information System
The Waste Act has a number of requirements that Recyclers need to comply with. One is that you need to comply to the “Basic Requirements for the Storage of Waste”, and that you need to have a “Waste License” if your operational space is more than 500 m2. The third requirement is that all recyclers need to be registered on the SAWIS: ‘Any person conducting an existing activity listed in Annexure 1 must apply to the Department to be registered on the SAWIS within ninety (90) days of the coming into operation of these Regulations” (which was years ago!). You can access the manual registration form. In short, do you have a WIR number? If not, get one.
• By-laws
Some metropolitan areas have their own Bylaws and rules that you also have to comply with. City of Cape Town has asked for a meeting with all the recyclers. I will communicate more with the Capetonians in due course. It will probably happen during the second week of February.
In Ekurhuleni all Waste Service Providers need to be accredited as well: “Forms can be downloaded from Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality Website. It sounds like waste management companies mainly, but some of you do collect recyclable materials directly from source and it will also include those. There may be many more. Please talk to your own municipality and make sure that you are legal!
RECYCLING STATISTICS 2016
I am contracted again to gather the recycling stats for 2016 and will be visiting some of you in the next couple of weeks. Should you know of any new recyclers, recyclers that have closed down or anything that may affect the stats, please talk to me!
EQUIPMENT
- Do you have a RS-800 granulator for sale? Please contact Meagan on 079 898 9375.
- Are you down-scaling? I may have a buyer in Ekurhuleni for a good quality secondhand PE-LD Extruder and Pelletiser, European preferably. Let me know.
UPCOMING DATES
Before you go, please diarise the following dates:
22 Feb 2017 SAPRO Meeting Port Elizabeth
23 May 2017 SAPRO Meeting Cape Town
24 August 2017 SAPRO AGM Gauteng
15 September 2017 Best Recycled Product Competition Gala Evening Gauteng
21 November 2017 SAPRO Meeting KZN
Plan your business trips around these dates and attend the meetings. This is where you get all the updates and information that you need.
SAPRO MEMBERSHIP
Are you not a member? Please do something about it…
Have a superb weekend, enjoy your green garden if you are in one of the wetter provinces and good luck with the heat and fires “elsewhere” – as the weather reports say.
Regards
Annabe
