Since the 1st October, the Environment Agency has enforced rules on the export of waste tyres, no containers should be leaving without the appropriate paperwork. However, anecdotal evidence suggests there is still leakage in the system
Tyre and Rubber Recycling approached four of the key shipping lines to ask for their position on the shipping of waste tyres. All four had been suggested by a recycler who had knowledge of tyres being shipped via these lines.
One shipping line responded. Hapag Lloyd came back with a statement saying; “We do not accept used tyres, The control process is that we notify our colleagues in India who in turn obtain the consignees pre-approval. However, we are not currently exporting granulated rubber as our India colleagues are quite rightly restrictive by insisting on deposits and certain terms i.e. prepaid only, tariff free time.
“Regarding the Annex VII, in short, yes. rubber is viewed as highest risk and therefore the EA pay extra attention to those containers so if there’s no Annex document, the cargo is not shipped.”
However, not every container leaving a UK port has the veracity of its consignment checked. Some years ago, HMRC recorded UK Retread exports at a figure higher than the UK manufactured of imported put together. The implication being that ELT were being shipped out of the UK as retreads, allowing them to bypass waste tyre restrictions, and potentially access export markets where waste tyre imported were banned.
On the 29th October, The Telegraph carried a story that claimed cars were being stolen in the UK and exported abroad and there was nothing the Police could do about it.
Eleanor Dallaway, from cyber insurance firm Assured, was told that on the day the car was stolen, it was probably on a ferry and on its way abroad.
Tom Chisholm, deputy head of the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service (NaVCIS) is quoted in The Telegraph as saying; ““You can book one [container] today and say it’s full of teddy bears, and then fill it up with stolen cars and nobody would know.”
As with all rules and regulations, they are only as good as the enforcement, and with thousands of containers being shipped out of the UK every day, it is currently impossible to check the contents of every container against its consignment paperwork.
For so long as this is the case, the unscrupulous players will slip through the system.
The light at the end of the tunnel could well be digital waste tracking, which cannot come soon enough.
Ultimately, when every tyre has its own tag, tyres can then be traced back to their manufacturer, and since end of life is the responsibility of the producer, in the case of tyres that is the manufacturer, perhaps the manufacturers will pay more attention to where their end-of-life tyres end up – maybe.
