Questionnaire on recent Brussels Convention and Registration Fraud

A message from Mark Sellier (OneSteel), Chairman of the BIR Convention Committee

With over 900 delegates, our recent convention in Brussels was a great success and I am pleased to say that over the last 10 years attendance at our bi-annual events has been steadily growing.

However, we do not want to sit idle in light of the success but continuously improve the service to our members. For this reason, we developed a questionnaire in order to get feedback on our events and I would very much appreciate if those of you who have attended our last convention could take 10 minutes of your time to fill in this online form.

2010 has shown a number of changes with regards to the convention, namely a new online registration system, a ‘paperless’ electronic programme, a special convention branding with distinctive visuals and a specific convention websites that serve as portal for all information regarding the convention.

I would appreciate your feedback on this as well as on many other aspects of the convention in order to improve our service to you.

I would also like to address another issue that has been brought to my attention by some of my fellow members: at each BIR convention, there seems to be quite an important number of people who are not registered and who seek contact with BIR delegates. Although we cannot prevent anybody from accessing the public areas of the hotel, we would like to call on our members to carefully assess whether they want to do business with someone who deliberately by-passes convention registration, and by doing this undermines your investment in our world organisation. Also, I would like to point out that lending a convention badge to someone who is not registered is considered fraud and will result in the delegate’s immediate exclusion from the convention, the suspension of company membership privileges and possible expulsion from the organisation following a disciplinary process.

It is important that we can count on your co-operation – it is our members who shape BIR’s reputation in our sector and who strengthen BIR’s role as the voice of the international recycling industry.