Page 4 - Environmental_Ecology

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Chapter 1 Recycling of Waste

1.1 The concept of waste recycling

As European society has grown wealthier it has created more and more rubbish. Higher living standards
mean that people are buying more products. There are also more single-person households which tend to
produce more waste per person than families or groups .
1

Waste is an issue that affects us all. We all produce waste: on average, each of the 500 million people
living in the EU throws away around half a tonne of household rubbish every year. This is on top of huge
amounts of waste generated from activities such as manufacturing (360 million tonnes) and construction
(900 million tonnes), while water supply and energy production generate another 95 million tonnes.
Altogether, the European Union produces up to 3 billion tonnes of waste every year.

All this waste has a huge impact on the environment, causing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that
contribute to climate change, as well as significant losses of materials – a particular problem for the EU
which is highly dependent on imported raw materials. The amount of waste we are creating is increasing
and the nature of waste itself is changing, partly due to the dramatic rise in the use of hi-tech products.
This means waste now contains an increasingly complex mix of materials, including plastics, precious
metals and hazardous materials that are difficult to deal with safely.

For more than 30 years, efforts to reduce and avoid the negative impacts of waste on the environment and
human health have been central to EU environment policy. Significant progress has been made based on
the principle of the waste hierarchy that prioritises waste prevention and sees landfill generally as the least
favourable waste management option for the environment.

Finally, in January 2014, EU adopted the 7th Environment Action programme that will guide EU member
states until the end of 2020 and has following objectives:

• To reduce the amount of waste generated;
• To maximise recycling and re-use;
• To limit incineration to non-recyclable materials;
• To phase out land filling to non-recyclable and non-recoverable waste;
• To ensure full implementation of the waste policy targets in all Member States

1 https://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/pdf/WASTE%20BROCHURE.pdf