Welcome to Basel!

On behalf of the International Steering Committee I welcome you to the 10th International Automobile Congress IARC in Basel.
The city of Basel - then Basilea - was already mentioned in 374 AD. After this it had a rapid growth and became part of the Swiss confederation in 1501 as Kanton Basel. Today large pharmaceutical and chemical industries like Roche, Novartis and Ciba have their headquarters in this beautiful city. Basel is also well known for its culture and has for example 41 museums of which Museum Tinguely is one.

A connection to the recycling world in general is the Basel Convention. The Basel Convention – the control of transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal – entered into force on May 5, 1992 after being signed by 51 states. There has been a lot of debate which is still going on about the definitions regarding recovery, recycling and re-use. Although the convention declares that illegal hazardous waste traffic is criminal, it contains no real enforcement. Exporting waste in a general sense is still going on a large scale to third world countries to avoid high disposal costs.

As long as there are ways to avoid the high disposal costs the technology to process for example ASR will develop slowly. Also the fact that the EU ELV directive is not implemented on a global scale has an impact on technological developments, trade, markets and waste export.

The recent revisions of June 2008 and the national interpretation of the revised ELV directive by the member states of the EU are also influencing the technological development and the investments in recycling plants and the development of the market for the generated products. All this means that the dream “yes we can” of a level playing field for technology, processes and markets is still a goal to realize. The different market conditions will make the export to economical more attractive regions an ever increasing option although the Basel Convention is still supposed to be enforced.

As already mentioned in the foreword of 2009 stability is needed for the technological developments, mature markets and an economical approach to ELV recycling. Continuously changing the EU rules for ELV recycling in combination with a poorly defined playing field are very difficult matters to deal with for the ELV recycling industry in general. On top of all this are the present weak metal markets and the general economic outlook as an extra challenge for the recycling industry to push forward.

I am looking forward to discuss the new and the old challenges and new business opportunities in Basel.
Let us get some inspiration for a solution in the city of the birth of the “Basel Convention”.


Prof. Wijnand Dalmijn
Chairman of the Steering Committee
International Automobile Recycling Congress