Pete Harrison, PlanetArk 18 Jun 08;
STRASBOURG, France - European Union lawmakers approved new targets for recycling rubbish on Tuesday, aiming to curb greenhouse emissions from landfill sites, but green groups said the deal would not cut growing trash piles.
The agreement, which will have to be approved by member states before becoming law, is part of an EU effort to get on top of a growing problem typified by mountains of waste in Naples, Italy.
Rubbish is growing faster than the 27-nation bloc's GDP.
The European Parliament voted for the goal of recycling or re-using half of the main types of EU household waste by 2020 and 70 percent of all waste from building and demolition.
"Calorific waste is a valuable and energy-rich resource that must not be landfilled," said Jan-Erik Johansson of PlasticsEurope, which welcomed the agreement.
"Every item that is recycled or recovered saves harmful methane emissions from landfills."
Over 1.8 billion tonnes of waste are generated each year in Europe, equating to 3.5 tonnes per person, of which less than a third is recycled.
"There will be big pressure on the UK and Ireland, let alone in eastern Europe, to move towards these levels of recycling," said British MEP Caroline Jackson, who led the legislation through parliament. "I don't think it will be popular."
She said only about 2 percent of household waste was now recycled in Hungary, and only about 13 percent in parts of London, while in Holland and Denmark landfilling had been almost eliminated.
GARBAGE MAFIA
But environmentalists criticised the agreement for promoting incineration, for being unenforceable and for failing to set limits on the amount of waste produced.
"This promotes incineration, a waste-hungry technology which is counterproductive to any effort to tackle the waste mountains at their source," said Welsh MEP Jill Evans.
PlasticsEurope countered that even burning rubbish was better than letting it rot. "Given the scarcity of energy resources, we need to make use of every viable complement to fossil fuels," said Jan-Erik Johansson.
Caroline Jackson said parliament had failed to agree waste prevention targets as current volumes were largely kept secret by a murky industry.
"We are operating in the dark," she said. "Waste is a secret area, as demonstrated in Naples."
Crime experts say the Camorra, the Naples mafia, has been involved in the lucrative waste dumping business for decades -- one of the reasons the city's refuse system ground to a halt at the end of last year when all official dumps were declared full.
Political inadequacy and local opposition to new waste disposal sites has hampered years of attempts to clean up what has become a chronic problem in Italy's third-largest city.
"We all know what has been going on in Naples," said Jackson. "But I don't want to end up as a concrete block, so I won't go any further."
The agreement also laid down the order that member states should use for dealing with waste.
As a first priority, states will not create waste in the first place, secondly they will re-use things such as beer crates, thirdly they will recycle what they can, fourthly they will recover at least the energy contained in rubbish, and as a last resort, they can dump rubbish. (Reporting by Pete Harrison; editing by James Jukwey)
