Municipal waste management in Europe: a comparison of national regimes

Abstract

A review of European waste management demonstrates that, even if not contemporaneously, each one of the five member states has encountered similar problems regarding municipal waste treatment. These problems originated in the impact of the rapid economic development experienced since the 1950s on traditional forms of organization of waste disposal. The shock resulted firstly in inadequate and saturated capacities of safe treatment, increasing environmental pressure, followed by environmental activism and NIMBY2 forms of local reaction, protesting against even an extension of traditional techniques of disposal (landfilling, incineration). Germany and The Netherlands were the first countries to encounter such strong quantitative and qualitative modifications in waste flows that their governments decided that new concepts were necessary in the field of waste management. For a variety of reasons, including lower geographical density of human activities in France, slower economic development in a large part of Italy, and slower still in Greece, the same problems appeared later in other parts of Europe.KeywordsWaste ManagementLocal AuthorityNational RegimeEnergy RecoveryHousehold WasteThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.