The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal (Basel Convention): The most comprehensive regulation governing the transboundary movements of hazardous and other waste.
Biomaterial trade: The trade in raw and intermediate biological materials and goods (including renewable resources from land and sea used for construction, feed, food and the generation of bioenergy).
By-product: Any additional product, other than the principal or intended product, which results from extracting or manufacturing activities and which has a market value, without regard to whether such additional products were an expected or intended result of extracting or manufacturing activities.
Circular economy activity: Any activity that results in the decoupling of economic activity from the consumption of finite resources. This includes refusing, rethinking, reducing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, remanufacturing, repurposing, recycling and recovering.
Circular economy-enabling goods and services: Any good or service that contributes to the conduct of circular economy activities.
Circular trade: Any international trade transaction that contributes to circular economy activities at the local, national and global levels.
Free trade agreement: An agreement according to international law by which participating countries agree on certain obligations that seek to reduce barriers to trade in goods and services, such as tariffs.
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS): A 1995 treaty of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that aims to create a reliable and predictable system of international rules for trade in services and facilitate the progressive liberalization of services markets.
Harmonized System (HS) codes: The Harmonized System is a standardized numerical method of classifying traded products. Used by customs authorities around the world to identify products when assessing duties and taxes and for gathering statistics.
Low-, middle- and high-income countries: As defined by the World Bank. In 2021, low-income countries’ gross national income (GNI) per capita was <$1,046, middle-income countries’ GNI $1,046–$12,695 per capita, and high-income countries’ GNI >$12,695 per capita.
Product-service systems: Business models that provide for cohesive delivery of products and services. Examples include leasing or sharing of goods.
Recovery: Any operation that results in waste serving a useful purpose, by replacing non-waste materials that would otherwise have fulfilled a particular function. For example, turning food waste into compost to displace synthetic fertilizers. (For the purposes of this paper, recovery does not include energy-from-waste.)
Recycling: The reprocessing of waste into materials, products or substances, though not necessarily for the original purpose.157
Refurbishment: Restoring used products to full working condition, including testing and verifying that they are fully functional and thus free of defects.
Remanufacturing: An industrial process whereby used products (referred as ‘cores’) are restored to useful life. During this process, the core passes through several remanufacturing steps, including inspection, disassembly, part replacement/refurbishment, cleaning, reassembly and testing, to ensure it meets the desired products standards.
Residue: Material or energy that is left over or wasted in industrial processes and other human activities. Many residues can be reused or revalorized to be injected back into the same manufacturing process or used for another purpose. Examples include waste heat and gaseous pollutants from electricity generation or slag from metal-ore refining. Whether the residue can be reused or not depends on whether the country or a trading partner considers it a waste or by-product.
Reuse: The using-again of a fully functional product that is not waste for the same purpose for which it was conceived without the necessity of repair or refurbishment, but which may require additional steps such as cleaning or redeployment.
Scrap: Discarded or rejected material from an operation suitable for reprocessing. Items can be classified as scrap if processed by crushing, cutting, mangling, melting, shredding or tearing. Common types of scrap traded include glass, metal, paper and textiles.
Secondary raw materials: Materials that have been manufactured and used at least once, and that are recovered (from the waste stream or from used products) to be used again for further manufacturing.
Technical barriers to trade: Mandatory technical regulations and voluntary standards that define specific characteristics that a product should have, such as its design, functionality, labelling, marking, packaging, performance, size or shape.158
Valorization: Extracting residual value from waste products of organic origin. An example is the extraction of nutrients (phosphorous), energy and carbon (anaerobic digestion or composting) from wastewater or the extraction of enzymes for use in chemicals, fuels and plastics from agricultural or brewing by-products (such as spent grains) through biorefining.
Waste: Substances or objects that are disposed of, intended to be disposed of, or required to be disposed of by the provisions of national law.159 For the purposes of this research paper, waste trade flows are divided into recoverable and non-recoverable. Both scrap and residues are considered to be forms of waste.
Waste recovery: Extracting valuable materials from the waste stream with the aim of displacing new material in the production process. Embedded value in the waste materials is recovered via sorting, material-processing and recycling methods. Examples of waste recovery include using bricks and crushed concrete as a form of aggregates for building foundations and roads or the use of energy, nitrogen, phosphorous and organic matter from wastewater.
Secretariat of the Basel Convention (undated), ‘Small Intersessional Working Group: Mandate of the small intersessional working group’, http://www.basel.int/Implementation/LegalMatters/LegalClarity/Glossaryo….
European Commission Trade Department (2013), Technical barriers to trade, Brussels: European Commission, https://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2013/april/tradoc_150987.pdf.
Secretariat of the Basel Convention (undated), ‘Small Intersessional Working Group’.
