Recycling & Waste – European Parliament Votes For New EU Rules
The European Parliament yesterday voted to beef up a proposed new EU directive setting out a framework for how to deal with the growing mountains of waste produced across the European Union.
Among the amendments adopted by MEPs in this first reading of the proposal:
• The establishment of a hierarchy in the treatment of waste for the first time in a piece of EU legislation. The ’hierarchy’ lays down an order of preference for waste operations: re-use; recycling; other recovery operations; and, as a last resort, safe and environmentally sound disposal;
• On incinerators, MEPs backed the energy efficiency principle by setting out a scale of standards to be met by incinerators; a majority of MEPs, however, rejected the idea that incineration should be regarded as recovery;
• Targets for prevention of waste would have to be laid down for each Member State by 2010 and reached by 2020; with a view to stabilising waste production at 2008 levels by 2012, Member States would have to draw up national prevention programmes within 18 months of the directive entering into force;
• On recycling, MEPs introduced a 50% target for municipal waste by 2020 and 70% recycling or re-use of waste from construction, demolition, industry and manufacturing.
Unless the Council of Ministers accepts all of the amendments adopted this week, the directive will return for a 2nd reading in the European Parliament at a later stage.
EXCERPTS from Monday’s debate (12 February 2007) in Strasbourg:
CAROLINE JACKSON (Conservative, South West – rapporteur): We do not want a repeat, as the Commissioner has said, of what happened recently where recourse to the European Court of Justice for clarification has sometimes produced judgments that are confusing, contradictory and just plain bizarre. Legislators, not judges, should make laws.
We have spent much time defining the waste hierarchy. This is often referred to, but until now has not been defined in any EU legal text. The committee preferred the five-stage waste hierarchy to the Commission’s rather muddled, flatter version. The problem is how to establish that the hierarchy should not be used as a rigid requirement, but should be seen as a flexible but general principle
We grappled with the issue of how one defines when waste ceases to be a waste. This gave us the opportunity to indicate through this directive which items should be given priority by the Commission, if necessary by drawing up specifications to define when they cease to be waste.
Finally, there is the question of the energy efficiency criteria, which, if met by a particular energy from a waste plant, would allow that plant to be categorised as a recovery and not a disposal operation. This seems to me an eminently sensible idea. Such a designation has environmental and commercial advantages. The criteria for designation as a recovery operation need to be high enough to be something of a gold standard
Although this is a directive that mainly defines terms, we felt it should address the issue of waste prevention. It is no good the EU being a world leader in waste terminology if it continues to be a world leader in waste generation. I am therefore proud that, at my suggestion, Parliament’s amendments contain for the first time a proposal for an EU commitment to stabilise overall waste production by 2012 at the levels which it reached in 2008.
JILL EVANS (Plaid Cymru,
The basis of the whole wast