Faster ... but smarter or more destructive?

Waste

EU funds are an opportunity to improve recycling services…
The average CEE household still produces much less waste than one in western Europe. At the same time, most CEE countries recycle around three times less compared to Germany or the Netherlands. The priority for CEE countries in the upcoming years should be to prevent increases in waste volumes, while rapidly increasing recycling. New EU waste legislation has now set a 50% recycling target until 2020 which should be coupled with targeted investments from EU funds, so that the new member states could develop into recycling societies within a decade.

…but incineration companies are eyeing the money
EU waste and cohesion policy explicitly promotes prevention and recycling of waste over incineration and landfilling because they are more cost-effective and create more jobs. However, there are concerted efforts underway to instead divert much of the EU money into promoting waste incineration, which would perpetuate an unsustainable and uneconomic approach to waste for many years to come. In Poland, for example, there is a plan to spend EU funds on 12 large municipal waste incinerators at a cost of over €1.1bn in the 2007-2013 period – this would consume 66% of Poland’s Cohesion Fund money for waste management. The EU should prevent such misguided investment.

Incinerators – a waste of public money
Incinerators, even if they produce energy by burning waste, are not a good investment of public money because they:

• squander precious materials that could be reused or recycled, thus necessitating imports of increasingly expensive new raw materials from around the world at a huge cost to national economies
• produce high CO2 emissions, thus contradicting efforts to limit climate change
• harm surrounding communities with toxic pollution and generate toxic ash
• will face public protests, leading to difficulties with getting construction permits, thus jeopardising the full absorption of EU funds
• block development of waste prevention and recycling because incinerators require a constant input of large amounts of mixed waste for decades in order to be profitable.

Recycling – better for the economy

• Every tonne of waste that is reused or recycled avoids the extraction, processing and importation of new resources.
• Recycling saves several times more energy than incinerators are able to produce by burning waste.   
• Recycling has lower investment and operation costs: a euro spent on recycling services will handle more waste than a euro spent on incineration.
• Recycling creates many more jobs. The European Commission’s waste strategy states that: “recycling 10,000 tonnes of waste needs up to 250 jobs compared with 20 to 40 jobs needed if the waste is incinerated and about 10 for landfill”.   

Good practice in Czech municipalities towards Zero waste
In the Czech Republic, Bankwatch and FoEE's national group Hnuti Duha has been working closely with two municipalities on implementing the concept of Zero waste at the local level. Effective collaboration with municipal authorities in several municipalities such as Dubicko, Ostopovice, Dvůr Králové nad Labem and Šternberk was coupled with awareness-raising among the local community about the benefits of separation, composting and the recycling of waste. As a result, these two municipalities developed local Zero waste strategies and applied for EU funding in order to realise them. Such examples can be easily multiplied in other municipalities in CEE countries via the EU funds and thus reap multiple benefits for the economy, environment and society in a cost-efficient way.