According to the most recent European Commission (EC) reports, around 5.6 million tonnes of waste are shipped around the EU each year, and between 1997 and 2005, imports and exports throughout Europe increased fourfold. Shipments go from country to country for a variety of reasons: lower treatment prices; limited disposal options; environmental friendliness. With so much waste constantly on the move, keeping track of it all is a huge job, especially as there’s no single organisation to do so.

The Waste Shipment Regulation governs the supervision and control of shipments of waste, and incorporates the provisions of the Basel Convention, which addresses the movement of hazardous waste. Under this regulation, waste is moved in a way that is intended to preserve, protect and improve the quality of the environment. However, it’s not always that straightforward.

The regulation draws a distinction between waste for final disposal and waste for recovery, and assigns waste to one of two ‘lists’: ‘green’, if the waste is destined for recovery and doesn’t display any hazardous characteristics; ‘amber’ if it does. Amber list waste is subject to a control procedure involving at least a month of applications and financial guarantees and notifications to involved countries.

However, green list waste can be subject to the amber control procedure if it contains more than a de minimis amount of an amber waste. This is where issues start to arise in shipping waste around Europe. The ‘Guidance Manual for the Control of Transboundary Movements of Recoverable Wastes’ states that ‘in absence of internationally accepted criteria, the term “a de minimis amount” is to be defined according to national regulations and procedures’, and as has been well documented of late, the lack of internationally accepted criteria regarding contamination has caused the waste shipping industry a great deal of difficulty. Furthermore, a mixture of green wastes – even without hazardous characteristics or amber waste – is subject to the amber control procedure in some member states.

This can lead to conflicts between countries of import and export, which are settled by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). However, while there exists a framework accounting for differences in national legislation, some areas remain shaky. For example, if waste is considered to be subject to the amber control procedure only by the country of import and/or transit, then the obligations that usually apply to the exporter and country of export are instead taken up by the importer and country of import. However, there are no procedures in place for occasions where only countries of transit consider waste to be subject to amber control procedure. The guidance manual only suggests that the country of export arrange approval with the country of transit ‘through negotiations or by some other means’.

Legislative gaps like these undermine Europe’s entire waste shipment industry, and allow illegal shipments to fall through the net. Certainly, the term ‘illegal waste shipment’ conjures images of containers packed with foul smelling, jumbled and dangerous rubbish, lurking within a façade of neatly ordered green-list material. Indeed, one of the most reported recent instances of illegal waste shipment involved the Camorra profiting from Naples’ rubbish by surreptitiously sending hundreds of thousands of tonnes of it to a German waste treatment plant in need of feedstock. However, simply filling in paperwork incorrectly or failing to observe an application deadline can also render shipments illegal, and complicated bureaucratic processes don’t help the issue.

Figures over time show that illegal waste shipments increased between 2001 and 2005, and the European Environment Agency (EEA) has reported that annual illegal shipments vary between 6,000 and 47,000 tonnes, with an average of about 22,000 tonnes – equivalent to 0.2 per cent of all notified waste. However, the EEA also stipulates that these are probably minimum figures, as many member states lack sufficient information on their shipments, and highly aggregated reporting makes it difficult to properly analyse shipped waste streams.

“The definition of an illegal waste shipment covers very different situations,” says an EC spokesperson. “In certain cases there is an evident willingness to send illegally hazardous waste to countries where such imports are prohibited. In other cases, the illegality of the shipment is more of an administrative nature.” However, no figures detailing the prevalence of each ‘kind’ exist.

The ‘Study on Inspection Requirements for Waste Shipments’, published by the Institute of European Environmental Policy (IEEP) in August 2009, details staff numbers involved in shipment inspections across member states, and the figures vary considerably. Certainly, correlations cannot be drawn between waste shipment activity, staff numbers and inspection levels. While Belgium has 15 waste inspection staff and conducted 26,458 road inspections in 2008, Sweden – one of Europe’s biggest importers of waste shipments – carried out only two in the same year.

On the other hand, the EC spokesperson adds: “There is in general a correlation between the number of inspections and the likelihood to discover illegal shipments, and once one starts conducting focused inspections of certain waste streams shipped to certain countries on a regular basis, one can expect the exporters responsible for illegal shipments to adapt their behaviour to avoid being caught.” If more discoveries of illegal waste are being made in line with a greater number of inspections, then it would seem that more inspections need to be undertaken to expose illegal shipments.

However, in many cases waste inspection doesn’t just fall into the hands of the country’s environmental body, but can extend to police and customs departments, too.

Customs officers have waste jurisdiction in Hamburg, for example, where all electronic documentation is available to concerned authorities, allowing them to search immediately for suspicious indicators of illegal waste activity. In the UK, though, while the Environment Agency has excellent working relationships with the police, relations with other bodies – such as customs and immigration – need development. Indeed, the IEEP study illustrates how the UK Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) system, which records the movement of goods by land, air and sea in and out of the country, does not currently alert customs officers to illegal shipments of waste, even if paperwork has been filled out incorrectly.

Ultimately, the EU Waste Framework Directive indicates that member states need to move toward self-sufficiency in waste disposal. As the EC spokesperson notes: “It is important for the union as a whole to be self-sufficient in waste disposal through the establishment of a network for disposal installations. Member states shall move towards that aim individually, taking into account geographical circumstances or the need for specialised installations for certain types of waste.” However, with instances of cooperation lacking within member states and conflicting regulations between member states, achieving self-sufficiency for the EU as a whole will no doubt prove a daunting task.

Earlier this year, however, the EC published a study recommending setting up a dedicated waste law body to oversee the implementation and enforcement of waste law in the EU. The creation of such an organisation is estimated to cost more than €16 million, and it is hoped that its presence would help to tackle the underlying problem of poor waste implementation and bolster some countries’ basic waste infrastructure. “The study takes a broad look at the general deficit in the implementation of waste legislation in the member states,” says the EC’s spokesperson. “

It makes a strong environmental and economic case for strengthening EU level activities towards better implementation and enforcement of waste legislation.” However, whether these plans will go ahead or not has yet to be decided. “The recommendations of the study are currently being assessed, but many key EU waste requirements remain only on paper in many parts of the EU, even decades after their adoption.”