A wasted ‘hierarchy’ on EU waste?

The 1975 European waste framework directive is the foundation on which all EU waste laws are built. It sets out the ‘waste hierarchy’, which lists five possible options for waste treatment, ranked in order of preference, with the best first: prevention, re-use, recycling, energy recovery (generating energy through burning), simple disposal/landfill.

In December last year the Commission proposed a revision of the waste directive which, while keeping the hierarchy in place, allowed more room for member states to skip down a category for certain products.

In some cases, the new thinking goes, it takes more energy to recycle a product than it would to incinerate it. Sometimes it could even be more environmentally friendly to put an item into landfill than to re-use it.

"In principle the waste hierarchy remains," explains a Commission spokeswoman, "unless you have information that leads you to reconsider priorities, after looking at the whole lifecycle of a product."

The December proposal asks member states to draw up their own waste prevention programmes, which take account of this "lifecycle approach". The Commission opted for 25 national plans, rather than an EU-wide scheme, to allow for existing differences in waste management abilities.

Parts of Scandinavia, for example, now have incineration plants efficient enough to be considered non-polluting, according to the Commission.

Friends of the Earth (FoE), the conservation group, was among the first to complain. "There is an amazing lack of vision in what the Commission is proposing," says Michael Warhurst of FoE.

The group was particularly angry at the Commission’s suggestion that efficient incineration should be re-branded as recovery, rather than disposal. This would push an option long considered the most environmentally damaging further up the waste hierarchy.

FoE says Europe should aim to freeze the average amount of waste produced at 2012 levels. By 2025 at the latest there should be a total ban on landfill, it says. At this date, all waste that cannot be re-used should be recycled or composted.

EU waste oils re-refining group GEIR was irritated to see the long-standing priority given to waste oil regeneration (cleaning and re-using oils) scrapped by the Commission proposal.

"The justification for this repeal is questionable as it is largely based on data that is at least eight to ten years old and does not take into consideration important technological developments in the sector," according to a statement from GEIR.

GEIR, together with others in the Recycling Coalition lobby group, now hopes that the European Parliament will put the emphasis firmly back on recycling - including regeneration.

But the European Federation of Corrugated Board Manufacturers (FEFCO) says a flexible hierarchy is essential.

Secretary-General Wim Hoebert claims it is "nonsensical" to say recycling or re-use is always the best option.

"That’s because the overall impact of any packaging solution depends on the details. Either [recycling or re-use] can be best, depending on circumstances."

Reusable packaging can be the best option in some circumstances, according to Hoebert, for example to ship products from a warehouse to a nearby distribution point.

But transporting goods in re-usable packaging to the other side of Europe, he explains, just entails washing and shipping the crates back again: "That means greenhouse gases and chemical residues from the washing process and the 2,000 kilometre-trip back in an emissions-belching truck.

"By contrast, one way packaging like corrugated crates gets recycled close to the point of final use."

The fibres can then, says Hoebert, be used as new cardboard or even precious biomass. "If the waste hierarchy automatically promotes re-use, more environmentally damaging packaging solutions can be favoured by policy," he adds.

The European Federation of Waste Management and Environmental Services (FEAD) agrees with FEFCO on the need for a flexible hierarchy. "It usually makes sense to recycle as much as possible," says Nadine de Greef, secretary-general of FEAD. "But recycling does not always make sense from an environ-mental point of view."

She warns that the suggested lifecycle approach could also throw up problems. "A lifecycle assessment of each waste stream, showing clear net benefit, will be totally impossible.

"Who would do the assessment? How would the results compare from one member state to the other? We need a more developed and harmonised methodology; the situation is not sufficiently developed for this approach."

The 1975 European waste framework directive is the foundation on which all EU waste laws are built. It sets out the ‘waste hierarchy’, which lists five possible options for waste treatment, ranked in order of preference, with the best first: prevention, re-use, recycling, energy recovery (generating energy through burning), simple disposal/landfill.