Introduction
A bit lost about the legal status of your rubbish? Believe me, you are not alone! The European Union has many different directives legislating the “waste” issue. The European Union presents the waste management issue like this at http://europa.eu:
Every year, some 2 billion tonnes of waste – including particularly hazardous waste – are produced in the Member States, and this figure is rising steadily. Stockpiling waste is not a viable solution and destroying it is unsatisfactory due to the resulting emissions and highly concentrated, polluting residues. The best solution is, as always, to prevent the production of such waste, reintroducing it into the product cycle by recycling its components where there are ecologically and economically viable methods of doing so.
If you want to know about waste and European legislation, you have to visit this link: Europe waste management, it definetely is where you should start. The mother of all waste directives, the one that sets the legal framework for all of them is Directive 2006/12/EC. If you are unfamiliar with directives, I’ll tell you that the first 4 digits is the year of approval (2006 in this case, so quite recent). The EC means it was approved by the European Commission. I don’t know about the 12 though. Ideas? If you have the title of the directive and want to find the text on the web, just googled it. It always works for me.
Directive 2006/12/EC aims to reduce waste production in Europe. It was also approved to promote recycling and reduce disposal in landfill. Between these two options we have incineration with energy recovery, cheaper than recycling and less damaging than disposal. No material is obtained from incineration, obviously, so it does not limit our consumption of raw materials as recycling.
All waste is classified into 4 main categories, which are then managed by different directives:
- hazardous waste: Council Directive 91/689/EEC
- waste from specific activities, like ship dismantling, mining or titanium dioxide
- radioactive waste and substances
- waste from consumer goods
I’m going to focus on the last point, waste from consumer goods, as it includes wastestreams that are very common. These are the categories of waste included under consumer goods:
- packaging and packaging waste: directive 2004/12/EC
- PCBs and PCTs: council directive 96/59/EC
- batteries and accumulators: directive 2006/66/EC
- waste oil: council directive 75/439/EEC
- end-of-life vehicles, ELV: directive 2000/53/EC
- waste electrical and electronic equipment, WEE: directive 2002/96/EC
PCBs and PCTs need a directive on their own, since they represent a hazard for health and environment. They were widely used as coolants in fridges that now accumulate on our landfills while we try to get rid of them safely. The council directive 96/59/EC sets guidelines on how to do so.
Similarly, the European commission fixed a threshold on the content of mercury or cadmium in batteries and accumulators in Directive 2006/66/EC, while encouraging recycling and safe disposal of those already in the market. Amongst this group of special wastes is oil, which is managed by council Directive 75/439/EEC.
If you want to know more about waste of electrical and electronic equipment, you can read my post about directive 2002/96/EC and how it relates to RoHS and REACH. I will soon deal with the packaging and ELV directive in separate posts, as they have a direct impact on plastics.
Very important jargon
Now, to understand the requirements of the waste directives in general, you have to know well your jargon, what they mean by all those terms, so here is a handy list:
- collection: a wastestream has to be collected separately from others and stored safely until treated. Collection systems have been created throughout Europe to collect the most diverse things, from batteries to cars. Collecting and storing is in itself a business. New directives put the responsibility onto manufacturers to manage and fund collection.
- re-use: a product or parts of it are reused without chemical or physical treatment. This is the best option for waste, but it’s difficult to asses how much of are waste is actually reused. Private initiatives are very strong at promoting reuse, like NGOs that donate mobiles or computers to developing countries, giving them a new life while helping.
- recycling: recovering materials from waste and treat them so they can be used again in the production chain. The most common form of recycling is physical recycling, where no chemical treatment is applied. There are still ongoing arguments to decide if chemical recycling of plastics (where plastics are returned to monomers, which can then be used again to manufacture plastics) is considered as recycling. When the European Union sets a recycling target, usually a weight percentage, reuse items count towards it, as it remains the optimal solution.
- Incineration with energy recovery: Waste that is not recycled or reused can only go two ways, it either ends up in landfill or it burns. If it is going to be incinerated, we may as well take something back from it, so energy produced is recovered. Advantages of this method: is cheap. No need to sort the waste and right now it should be safe, or at least the technology exists to make incinerators safe. Disadvantages: no material is recovered, so new one has to be produced.
- recovery: basically, anything that doesn’t go to landfill is recovered. Recovery targets can be reached by recycling, reusing and incinerating with energy recovery.
- landfill: well, waste that ends up in landfills or even worts in uncontrolled, illegal wastelands. By far the worst option.
Conclusion
Directives related with consumer goods tend to have differentiated targets for recycling and recovering, avoiding the massive use of incineration. Up to now most of the recycling targets in consumer goods were reached just by recycling metal, which remains the most profitable recyclate. More stringent targets in the recycling of cars and electronics will force plastics and other materials to be recycled. This is demonstrating a strong force in the development of new recycling technology through Europe, a subject that I promised you deserves at least a whole post. So do the ELV and packaging directive.
Sources and links:
waste directive: Directive 2006/12/EC
hazardous waste: 91/689/EEC
batteries and accumulators: directive 2006/66/EC
PCBs and PCTs: council directive 96/59/EC
waste oil: council Directive 75/439/EEC
WEEE: directive 2002/96/EC
ELV: directive 2000/53/EC
packaging: directive 2004/12/EC
