A proposal by the European Federation for Waste Management and Environmental Services (FEAD, Brussels; www.fead.be) to establish rules for transporting hazardous waste was approved by the RID Committee of Experts’ standing working group on 30 November 2023.

The RID Committee of Experts is part of the Intergovernmental Organisation for International Carriage by Rail (OTIF, Berne, Switzerland; www.otif.org). 

The new rules will be included in existing dangerous goods regulations RID and ADR from some time in 2025. FEAD said their inclusion “ensures a basic and permanent level playing field and provides the necessary legal certainty to the sector to operate, where there were no rules at all until now”. 

The federation’s proposal was to transport certain waste contained in different individual (inner) packaging to be combined in one outer packaging. 

Claudia Mensi, FEAD president, commented, “This is an important achievement for FEAD as it provides our companies with the necessary rules to operate safely and compliantly. We will continue to work hard to make sure that the dangerous goods regulations are fully applicable to the waste sector.”

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The federation has been working with the RID Committee of Experts and the Working Party on the Transport of Dangerous Goods, part of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE, Geneva, Switzerland; www.unece.org), since 2005 to develop specific rules for waste, including its packaging, classification and information requirements in transport documents. 

As new products, dangerous goods are classified and packed for transport in line with current legislation. But once these products reach their end of life, they become waste and the existing transport rules no longer apply. 

This, said FEAD, creates huge challenges and legal uncertainty for waste management operators, which encounter a huge variety of different wastes of unknown composition, with the original packaging damaged or disappeared, and the required information not available or reliable. 

In the absence of easily workable rules under the existing agreements and to respond to industry requests, some countries had already developed national rules, which FEAD said it took as a basis to propose harmonised and general provisions at an international level. 

The federation plans to provide more details on the new waste provisions in its digital magazine due to be published in December and accessible online via its website.