Towards improved inventories on hazardous wastes

Towards improved inventories on hazardous wastes

Parties to the Basel Convention are required to transmit to the Secretariat, at the end of each calendar year, their respective national reports pursuant to Article 13, paragraph 3. The national report questionnaire contains qualitative and quantitative information. This is a mechanism that allows Parties to share information with each other and it also indicates some level of the implementation of the Basel Convention.

Based on the needs observed through workshops conducted in 2011 and 2012 in the area of reporting, the Secretariat has been requested by the Conference of the Parties,at its meeting in 2013, to develop a generic inventory tool for hazardous wastes and other wastes. This tool shall serve multiple countries that do not have the means to develop or to buy such system and it should assist them in managing the quantitative data of inventories of hazardous wastes and other wastes to be submitted in their national reports.

This expert group meeting aims to discuss, among experts in the area of inventory of hazardous wastes, the features required for the generic a inventory tool for hazardous wastes and other wastes. Experts will show some examples of tools used in this context and the group will define what are the key elements to be present in the tool, how to deal with the issues related to the data collected in inventories, including classification systems, units conversion, and which main waste streams should be the priority to be tacked by the tool. 

The outcome of the meeting will be the list of features that such a tool should have. Based on this exchange among experts, the Secretariat of the Basel Convention will then engage an IT consultant to develop the tool later in 2015. Once ready, the tool will be given to developing countries, so that they can organize their data on inventories of hazardous wastes.

Thanks to the support of German government, the Secretariat is able to organize this meeting and to invite experts in the field of inventories of hazardous wastes to participate in the discussions.