by Brianna Crandall — August 22, 2012—The European Commission has released a new report on how Member States manage their municipal waste that shows “startling” differences across the European Union (EU). The report grades the 27 Member States against 18 criteria, using green, orange and red flags in areas such as total waste recycled, pricing of waste disposal, and infringements of European legislation. The resulting scoreboard forms part of an ongoing study that will help Member States improve their waste management performance. Situated at the top of the table are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, none of which have more than two red flags. But the pattern is reversed at the other end of the scale, where green flags are scarce.
Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik said, “The picture that emerges from this exercise confirms my strong concerns. Many Member States are still landfilling huge amounts of municipal waste—the worst waste management option—despite better alternatives, and despite structural funds being available to finance better options. Valuable resources are being buried, potential economic benefits are being lost, jobs in the waste management sector are not being created, and human health and the environment suffer. This is hard to defend in our present economic circumstances.”
The Member States with the largest implementation gaps are Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Failings include poor or non-existent waste prevention policies, a lack of incentives to divert waste from landfills, and inadequate waste infrastructure. Heavy reliance on landfilling means that better waste management options such as re-use and recycling are consistently underexploited. The outlook is accordingly poor.
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, by contrast, have comprehensive waste collection systems and landfill less than five percent of their waste, according to the report. These countries reportedly have well developed recycling systems and sufficient treatment capacity, and they perform well with biodegradable waste. Typically, they blend legal, administrative and economic instruments to good effect in their waste management policies.
A number of Member States have made rapid progress from reliance on landfilling to its virtual elimination. But even the best performers face a number of challenges such as stepping up waste prevention and addressing overcapacity in the incineration sector, which may hamper recycling and require imports of waste to feed incinerators, notes the report.
The Commission is using this report to prepare Roadmaps for the ten worst-performing Member States. These will be discussed with national authorities at bilateral seminars this fall, starting in Prague on September19. The Roadmaps will help spread best practices and will contain tailor-made recommendations on how to improve waste management using economic, legal and administrative tools, and EU structural funds.
The Commission is looking to use EU structural funds with a greater focus on the objectives of EU waste policy. The proposed Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) 2014-2020 will ensure that EU money is only invested in waste management projects if certain conditions are met beforehand, including the development of Waste Management Plans in accordance with the Waste Framework Directive and with the waste hierarchy, favoring prevention, reuse and recycling over incineration with energy recovery, with landfilling or incineration without energy recovery as a last resort.
The report noted that a recent study prepared for the Commission estimates that full implementation of EU waste legislation would save €72 billion a year, increase the annual turnover of the EU waste management and recycling sector by €42 billion, and create over 400,000 jobs by 2020.
The Screening of Waste Management Performance of EU Member States report is available on the European Commission Web site, as are more Commission waste studies. See also the Eurostat Environmental Data Centre on Waste Web site, and the Commission Web site on waste management.
