Annual Report - Sens
Annual Report - Sens
Annual Report - Sens
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Forewords by the President and Managing Director<br />
Being fully prepared for tomorrow means doing our homework<br />
properly today. Appointing Patrick Lampert as our new Managing<br />
Director and successor to Heidi Luck, who held the post<br />
on a caretaker basis, and a decision on our future strategic<br />
focus by the Board of Trustees in 2011, the year under review,<br />
gave SENS (Swiss Foundation for Waste Management) an<br />
ideal starting point for completing its tasks successfully and<br />
achieving the aims it has set itself.<br />
Overall, SENS can be pleased with its success in 2011. Our<br />
targeted publicity activities have enabled us to raise consumer<br />
awareness of the importance of e-Recycling even more. Our<br />
harmonised recycling standards and a study on optimising<br />
collection point remuneration have further strengthened our<br />
position as a leading take-back and recycling system. Like<br />
long-distance runners we shall keep up the pace until we have<br />
achieved our aims.<br />
Our competence, experience and<br />
reliability make us an indispensable<br />
partner for manufacturers and importers,<br />
recycling companies and the trade,<br />
as well as for local authorities, cantons<br />
and Switzerland itself.<br />
The issue that has greatly preoccupied not just SENS but the<br />
whole of the Swiss recycling industry over the last two years<br />
or so is the revision of the 1998 Ordinance on the Return and<br />
Recy c ling of Electrical and Electronic Appliances, VREG /<br />
ORAREEA for short. SENS has participated in the process as<br />
a member of the monitoring group created by the Bundesamt<br />
für Umwelt (BAFU – Swiss Federal Office for the Environment,<br />
FOEN). The pivotal change, and therefore the most critical of<br />
the planned measures, is the introduction of an obligation to<br />
pay an advance recycling fee (ARF), which should help solve<br />
the current problem of people ‘jumping on the bandwagon’<br />
without paying. Until now the ordinance made the private<br />
sec tor entirely responsible for financing the return and recycling<br />
of electrical and electronic appliances. This has made<br />
4 SENS <strong>Annual</strong> <strong>Report</strong> 2011<br />
Andreas Röthlisberger<br />
SENS President<br />
Lawyer and senior partner at RVBS<br />
Partners, Attorneys at Law in<br />
Aarau, Switzerland, President of<br />
SENS, SENS International and<br />
the WEEE Forum.<br />
Switzerland the country that can boast to have the most streamlined<br />
statutory regulations by far in this sector in Europe.<br />
It was on the basis of this streamlined<br />
statutory framework that the two<br />
Swiss take-back systems, SENS and<br />
SWICO (Swiss Association for Information,<br />
Communication and Organisation),<br />
worked together to become European<br />
leaders in waste collection.<br />
By introducing an obligation to pay the ARF, the Federal Office<br />
for the Environment aims to safeguard the existing take-back<br />
systems and guarantee their future success. By becoming affiliated<br />
to a take-back system, manufacturers and importers can<br />
be exempted from the obligation to pay the ARF. SENS and all<br />
those involved intend to work hard to ensure that the revision of<br />
the VREG does not just result in more administration, but leads<br />
to effective, sustainable improvements in take-back systems.<br />
I am looking forward to facing these challenges together with<br />
the new Managing Director and his team and the members of<br />
the Board of Trustees.<br />
Andreas Röthlisberger<br />
SENS President