Recovery is a complex issue because of its environmental, trade and economic implications. It includes all the steps involved in recovering useable components of wastes so that they may be re-used, and the management of the unusable residues. This issue of transboundary movement of hazardous wastes destined for recovery operations could be reviewed in the context of the comprehensive management of such wastes and the environmental costs of using the analogous virgin materials. Waste management policies recognize the value of residues and wastes for their potential as economically useful materials or sources of energy and their potential for avoiding the environmental and economic costs from the extraction and processing of virgin materials. In future, cleaner and production methods, low waste technology and hazardous waste avoidance may help to reduce waste generation at source, but recycling and recovery operations would generally be preferred to landfilling and incineration.
Recovery operations have disadvantages. There is always a danger of sham recyclingwastes moved for final disposal in the guise of a recovery operation. Genuine recovery operations can be polluting. The availability of a cheap and easy recovery option can reduce the incentive to find and use other cleaner production options, contrary to the principle of the waste management hierarchy. The waste management hierarchy is explained in Chapter IV, and the advantages and disadvantages of the recovery of waste are discussed in more detail in Chapters VIII and IX.
One difficulty in reviewing the subject is the lack of sufficient quantified information or access to it about what hazardous wastes are exported to developing countries, what, if any, recovery technologies or processes have caused problems in developing countries and what environmental problems have occurred as a result. In contrast to this, a large body of information is available from authoritative sources in industrialized countries on the many aspects of recovery. This includes information about trends in world supply and demand, statistics on transboundary movements within industrialized countries, role of the secondary industrial sectors, priority waste streams more likely to be subject to recovery, the present extent of recovery, the present extent of recovery, current proven and developing technologies and environmental and health impacts of recovery, processes or operations.
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