Karolina Fras is a busy woman. As Team Leader on waste management policies and legislation at the European Commission’s Environment Directorate General, she’s in charge of the technical implementation of waste directives by member states. In the past, Fras has worked on the ELV Directive and the Packaging Directive, amongst others, but the hot topic now is the revised Waste Framework Directive (rWFD). This hefty piece of legislation entered into force in 2008 and should have been transposed by all member states by December 2010.

Of course, should have happened doesn’t meant has happened, and the directorate has 13 infringement cases open against member states that have either failed to transpose the legislation entirely or only partially transposed it. (To date, the directorate is still waiting to hear from five countries, including Fras’s native Poland.) She explains: “[Member states] have to manage their own domestically generated waste in line with the waste management hierarchy, and to make sure that they do, we can use a range of measures to enforce implementation. We start with meetings with member states, talking to them, organising awareness-raising or best practice exchange events. We would like to target especially those countries that are currently not in line with the hierarchy. Then, we can take member states to court, for instance where targets are not met or if there is a blatant violation of the hierarchy. This would be the case where all waste went to landfill or incineration and there was no sign of improvement in the waste management plans.”

Of course, some countries have it easier than others; Fras points out that states she terms ‘landfilling countries’ have not had “all that time that the other countries had building infrastructure and are only now in the process of doing it”. And other countries (or sometimes regions within countries) have already built up a substantial resource-aware society: “There are regions [in Italy] where you can really see that people are extremely inclined to properly manage their waste. Generally, the Scandinavian countries are very much into separate collection, reuse, recycling, although, at the same time, they incinerate quite a lot. Countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany are also very advanced in recycling, to an extent that their governments may face a little riot if they don’t provide for separate collection”, she laughs.

For all countries, the rWFD enshrined the waste hierarchy into law for the first time, and when asked for her thoughts on the UK’s tendency (shared by other countries that aren’t top performers) to focus on treatment and disposal, Fras pragmatically notes: “Investments should be directed to the top levels of the hierarchy but, of course, it doesn’t happen overnight. With waste being generated all the time, member states have to do something with it. The trouble is it seems easiest to just dump it in a landfill, and of course a compliant landfill is costly... Today’s

challenge is to ensure that countries which still landfill a lot don’t over-invest in energy recovery, which seems easier and cheaper than recycling, but in fact there are studies which show the opposite.”

Which isn’t to say the EC has plans to force incineration caps, say, on member states, as different countries clearlyhave different needs and capabilities. “The Nordic countries need energy. Also, we have to see incineration in terms of lifecycle impacts, not only the waste hierarchy in isolation: for example, we have to look at the broader context of available energy sources... There are a number of variables which have to be looked at while designing waste management, so the EU is not going to prescribe a one-off solution, like ‘you have to have this amount of incineration or that amount of recycling’. But, as a general rule, we would like to see the trend reversed so zero landfilling of waste, and much more recycling, because far too many materials are still lost.”

But, as Fras notes, it’s not only EU legislation that will push waste management practices up the hierarchy. The markets have a part to play, too: “Some member states may be dragging their feet a little bit, but I think that the economic climate is such that the industry will push them. The change is not only driven by us with the stick of infringements, it’s also internally driven by the industry, by the recyclers. Member states have realised or are starting to realise that waste is an important source of raw materials for them.”

This is especially true with more valuable commodities, like metal. Fras adds, however: “We still need legislation for cheap materials like, for instance, biowaste, compost, mixed plastics... I think we’re moving in the right direction, given that our resources are finite, but we still cannot really predict what will happen in the coming years.”

Each member state has to now develop a waste prevention plan as part of this push up the hierarchy and to help them along the way the Environment Directorate is running a study with the aim of developing waste prevention indicators: “The trouble is you need to prioritise, decide which type of waste you want to prevent”, Fras says. “If one looks at waste in general then one tends to focus on weight minimisation and target heavy waste, which may not necessarily be the problem... So, we want to first diagnose where waste prevention would make the biggest environmental sense and set indicators there.” She identifies biowaste, plastics and hazardous waste as streams that could potentially receive attention, though insists she doesn’t have ‘pre-fixed ideas’ prior to the publication of the findings.

In the meantime, member states can decide on different legislative drivers and structures to complement the markets; for her part, Fras seems to subscribe to the idea of variable charging: “[Waste prevention] is easier if there is a clear link understood by households and consumers that the more waste you generate the more you need to pay for its management.”

This is an idea that has faced strong opposition here in the UK, of course. Asked how she rates our performance in general, Fras notes: “I would say the UK is somewhere in the middle. It’s a complex picture, but it seems you are at a crossroads: either you stay at the lower levels of the hierarchy, with landfilling and incineration as predominant options, or you make a decisive jump up. The debate around commingled collection doesn’t really help. It might really push the words of quality recycling, but if it results in everything being left to the current system, the push for a change may not happen.”

Despite this statement, Fras seems reluctant to be drawn into the commingling v source separation debate that is raging in the UK, thanks to the vague wording in the rWFD and Defra’s interpretation of it. Though she refuses to pass judgement, she does point out: “In most countries, there isn’t a problem with the interpretation of what is meant by ‘separate collection’. I think it’s a very UK-specific issue linked to commingled collection that makes this provision sound unspecific.” The reason for this is that in most member states, different recyclable materials are not mixed during collection.

Regardless of the outcome of the judicial review in this country, the handling of some types of recyclable material will, in part, be determined by further EC legislation for declaring material end-of-waste criteria. These augment the rWFD to establish quality specifications for some of the key recyclable materials. The aim is to ensure good-quality recyclables can be regarded as a product, and not subject to the same level of regulation that applies to waste. The criteria have now been settled for end-of-waste metals; paper is at an advanced stage; proposals for glass are expected soon; and plastics will be dealt with next. They include specifications for contamination levels, some of which could be difficult for UK material recovery facilities, as they now operate, to meet.

However, producing legislation for end-of-waste criteria is a lengthy process, involving consultations, followed by research papers for each specific material, followed by proposals, followed by discussions with member states and so on. And that’s just the start. As Karolina Fras and her colleagues charged with implementing this legislation know all too well, member states’ adoption and buy-in can take many more years.

In 20 years’ time, Fras envisages a Europe that has made “a huge jump from landfilling to other options, especially recycling”. Bit by bit, she notes, Europe does appear to be realising the value of its waste resources. When reflecting on the future, she sounds optimistic about where we are going, tempered with a realism that comes from observing member states’ present condition. “I don’t dare to dream about a closed-loop, circular economy where all the waste is recycled into new products and we are much less dependent on imports of raw materials to Europe, as there are always some losses, but I think that should be the direction we’re going in.”