Strength and Weakness of Municipal and Packaging Waste System in Poland

Abstract

The European Union's approach to waste management is based on three principles: prevention, recycling, and reuse. The introduction to Directive 2006/12/EC of the European Parliament and the Council on Waste states that “the recovery of waste and the use of recovered materials as raw materials should be encouraged in order to conserve natural resources”. According to the newest Directive 2008/98/EC on waste recovery is one of the five objectives of environment-friendly waste management. The targets for re-use and recycling of waste, which should be attained by 2020, is:  for re-use and the recycling of waste materials such as at least paper, metal, plastic and glass from households and possibly from other origins as far as these waste streams are similar to waste from households, shall be increased to a minimum of overall 50% by weight;  and for non hazardous construction and demolition waste: defined in category 17 05 04 in the list of waste shall be increased to a minimum of 70% by weight (EC, 2008). Moreover, the Directive 2004/12/EC (amending Directive 94/62/EC) on packaging and packaging waste was adopted. This Directive aims to harmonize national measures in order to prevent or reduce the impact of packaging and packaging waste on the environment. Therefore the recovery (60% in 2014) and recycling (55% in 2014) targets were established and must be met by each member state. In Poland, although the recycling level for municipal waste has been increasing, it still remains at a very low level (approximately 8%). One of the reasons for this is that there are two parallel systems, which are responsible for separate collection, i.e.:  system for local communes, which are responsible for management of all type of municipal waste,  system for entrepreneur-manufactures, which are obliged for recovery and recycling of packaging waste. On both systems the market conditions, i.e. relatively high cost of separate collection, which depends on the amount of collected material, the unit size of the waste material, the quality