Annual Report - Sens

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