A group of economists brought together by Denmark’s Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) has called on the EU to rethink its application of the waste hierarchy. The bloc places too much emphasis on recycling and recycling targets, the institute argued following a seminar at its Copenhagen offices.
Developed in the 1970s, the waste hierarchy gives top priority to source reduction (waste prevention), followed in order by reuse, recycling (plus composting), incineration and finally landfill. EAI’s claim that the EU is putting too much emphasis on material recycling echoes the arguments of Europe’s incineration industry, which maintains that waste-to-energy is ‘environmentally competitive’ with recycling. EAI is calling for the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as the key tool in prioritising between waste management options. CBA suggests that, in many cases, waste-to-energy should actually be placed below landfill. Similar suggestions have been made before, notably in a study carried out for the European Commission in the 1990s.
