Endless-stairway

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The European Commission has insisted on the need for greater reliability and comparability of waste management data provided by Member States. To this end, last year launched an amendment to the Waste Framework Directive which proposed a new, allegedly more reliable and unique recycling accounting methodology for all European Union.

Initially it seems sensible to know how and when a waste has been recycled. Any given citizen, asked when he would consider that a steel can has been recycled, would most likely answer: “when the steel in that can has been melted to become something else.» This seems logical, right? For many Member States and MEPs, it is not.

The intense debate that is taking place in the European Union on this issue is unprecedented. Each Member State supports a different methodology, depending on its particular interests and situation. Some argue that it is impossible to trace the life cycle of a residue (e.g. can of tuna or a milk tetra-brick) until its complete recycling, that is, until it has been transformed into a new product. Therefore they propose to count it as recycled once it has been separated from the bulk of the waste, without being able to know or trace where it will go afterwards. This methodology allows a carton of milk that has been separated from the rest of the garbage and compressed into a bale, to be counted as recycled, regardless of its destination. Whether the milk carton ends up in a paper production plant, an illegal landfill in Ukraine or an incineration plant in Ghana, it would be counted as a recycled material. This alleged improved accounting method does not consider whether the waste has been 100% valorised and transformed into a new product in a controlled manner, minimizing the environmental impact of the process; or if it has been incinerated in a country without environmental controls, emitting CO2 and pollutants into the atmosphere without any control.

In the steel industry we have raised our voice against this irrational proposal that would make us take a step back in the common goal of achieving a true circular economy. This new method would allow us to fool ourselves into believing that the recycling rates have increased, without any guarantee that the waste has actually been recycled and transformed into a new product, as well as losing the traceability of such waste.

This issue is now in the hands of the so-called trialogue: the European Parliament, the Council (which are the Member States) and the Commission itself. The discussions will be hard as there are many economic interests at stake. Failure to achieve recycling rates imposed by the European Union may lead to sanctions, to modifications into the internal waste management system of any given country and to the dismantlement of management systems not completely reliable but that enrich a few.

The truth is that many times the lawmakers stand for grandiloquent goals and green speeches that appear to be very ambitious, but in reality cannot be translated into feasible environmental policies; so in the end it would rather lean towards inefficient, tepid and risky proposals that will please all, but for the sustainable development. A waste should not be considered as recycled until it has been transformed, through an authentic productive process, into a new product useful for society. Otherwise we will be fooling ourselves and the citizen with recycling rates in the European Union that have nothing to do with the authentic reality.

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