U.S. Requests Nations to Omit Plastic Trade Restrictions

In a letter to the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) earlier this month, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler requested that the nations buying U.S. recyclables refrain from implementing trade restrictions outlined in the Basel Convention.

Back in May, the U.N. Basel Convention voted to add new measures to restrict and bring disclosure to plastic waste trade. Under the measure, countries now have the right to be notified in advance about plastic waste trade shipments and have the right to refuse those shipments.

Resource Recycling reports that “under the current terms of the Convention, OECD member countries can continue receiving shipments from non-Basel party countries. If the OECD adopts the Basel changes, however, that trade relationship could change, hampering scrap material shipments to other developed nations.”

Resource Recycling has more details:

Federal regulators are asking countries that are major buyers of U.S. recyclables to refrain from implementing new trade restrictions laid out in the Basel Convention, a treaty covering global scrap material shipments.

U.S. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler on July 3 sent a letter to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a consortium whose members are generally considered non-developing nations. In his letter, Wheeler references significant scrap plastics-related changes that were approved to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal earlier this year.

The U.S. has a unique stake in asking that OECD countries not adopt the Basel changes. The U.S. is the only OECD member that is not a party to the Basel Convention.

Read the full article here.