Bid to force better waste sorting

Date: 22/05/1997

By Michael Mann

MOVES are under way to force Europe's householders to take much greater care over what they throw into municipal waste dumps.

Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard's officials are working on a revision to the 1991 hazardous waste directive which will aim to ensure that products such as batteries, solvents, paints, aerosol cans and bleaches are separated from less harmful rubbish.

Member states were due to submit their detailed responses to the plan by last week, in the wake of talks on the first draft in March between EU governments, industrial groups and environmentalists.

The proposals are designed to reduce the potential danger from the disposal of poisonous substances, whether by incineration or landfill. They should also ensure that “hazardous municipal wastes are kept out of the waste-water systems”.

The European Commission wants to place a duty on all member states to ensure that a whole range of products used in everyday life are segregated before final disposal.

But it would be left to the relevant national or local authorities to decide how this should be done. They could either encourage householders to sort their refuse into separate bins, or require waste management companies to separate hazardous from non-hazardous rubbish after collection.

“In more well-to-do areas, it would be perfectly practical to have perhaps five different bins outside each house, into which people could sort their rubbish. In high-rise blocks, things are less easy to control, but could be sorted out by the likes of us,” said Dieter Vogt of the European Federation of Waste Management and Environmental Services (FEAD).

The plan has been greeted with enthusiasm by some within the waste management industry, who believe that it offers a major business opportunity.

But the first inspection of the Commission's ideas in March threw up a number of obstacles to an eventual agreement. Some member states - the Netherlands, Denmark, Luxembourg, Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria, and Belgian Flanders - already have separate collection systems for hazardous waste. But others, such as France and Greece, have no such legislation.

Other contentious issues included the Commission's attempts to define exactly what constitutes a hazard. Some countries have already set up systems which include an extra category of 'problematic' waste, and are unhappy about the prospect of having to include less dangerous substances in the proscribed lists.

Representatives of European chemical firms also took issue with some of the Commission's proposed definitions which came close to including their products within the definition of hazardous waste.

The plan is likely to cause concern among local authorities because of the extra costs involved in collecting different types of refuse separately.

Perhaps the most difficult question is that of designing a logo which could be put on products to alert consumers to the need to segregate them, given industry concerns about potential costs, the risk of confusion with existing labels and the difficulty of finding space on packaging to accommodate clear instructions.

Despite initial hopes that a firm proposal could find its way on to the Commission's agenda by the summer, the timetable has been set back.

Redrafting is now under way based on preliminary comments from all interested parties, but one official admitted: “We will probably not be ready until the autumn.”