Welcome to Hamburg!

Let's celebrate the 5th IERC! After 4 very successful congresses in Davos and Basel, the Steering Committee decided to move further north - to Hamburg.

With 1.7 million inhabitants, the Hanseatic City of Hamburg is the second largest city in Germany and one of the 16 federal states of the Federal Republic of Germany. Hamburg is both a city and a state.

The port of Hamburg is the central hub for trade with Eastern and Northern Europe. As a container port, Hamburg takes second place in Europe and seventh place in the world. It is 120 km from the sea, but can nevertheless take the largest container ships in the world.

Hamburg offers a wide range of activities: the Kunsthalle Art Museum, the State Opera and a lot of music clubs on the Reeperbahn. There are 31 theatres, 6 music halls, 10 cabarets, 50 state and private museums and about 4,000 restaurants.

“WEEE goes global” - is that possible? From a “shipment” point of view, there is no problem. There might be some legal handicaps to move WEEE around the globe. At the congress we are going to discuss this very important topic.

One thing is for sure, Asian countries are importing big volumes of ferrous and non ferrous scraps and plastics out of the WEEE recycling streams. As soon as these countries are going to adopt a high level recycling scheme, probably they are also importing WEEE directly from all over the world. It is very important for the industry to keep an eye on such trends in order to make the right decisions for future investments.

We are looking forward to meet you in beautiful Hamburg.


Roger Burri
Chairman of the Steering Committee
International Electronics Recycling Congress