eWASA News – 10 Dec 21

On 2 December 2021, DFFE published amendments to the EPR regulations as per the attached link.

These amendments deal primarily with clarifying the following:-

• Regulation 1 – Summary Audit Report
• Regulation 5 – submission dates of the audit and summary reports
• Regulation 8 – extending the first reporting period to include Nov/Dec into the reporting year 2022
• Removing lead-acid batteries and lighting from the current electrical and electronic sector regulations

Please note that these proposed amendments are now open for public comment for the next 30 days.

Kindly submit any comments you may have to info@ewasa.org by no later than 23 December 2021 and we will include them in our submission to DFFE.

Furthermore, we have, to date, had no response to our written submission to the Minister which we submitted on Wednesday, 1 December 2021.

The Atlas is a collaboration between the Basel Action Network (BAN) and graduate students Matthew Gordon (Yale University) and Anna Papp (Columbia University). The project aims to harness human discoveries and inputs from satellite and computer technology to identify sites around the world where plastic waste ends up in the terrestrial environment. The goal is to raise awareness worldwide of the unsustainable characteristics of plastic and the large degree it has become an unwanted geographic feature of our collective landscape and Earth’s biosphere.

BAN is soliciting submissions from each of you for the locations of plastic waste dumps to begin the creation of a global database of these sites. If you know of a major dump site (at least the equivalent volume of waste as a large city bus), please submit the information here.

They will use satellite data to view the user-submitted dump locations this data will, in turn, refine the satellite’s algorithm to find more sites independently/automatically. The Atlas will ultimately contain data based on your submissions to the entry portal, as well as verified new locations discovered by satellite.

BAN says: “Help us create and build this Atlas by inputting known sites in your part of the world and likewise tell your friends to join in from their corners of the world. Together we can make this Atlas a comprehensive global snapshot and help the public and governments better understand the severity of the plastic malignancy on the Earth today.”