Waste statistics

The committee adopted the report by Hans BLOKLAND (EDD, NL) approving the proposal under the codecision procedure (1st reading), subject to a number of amendments designed to tighten it up. In particular, it felt that the Member States should be obliged to provide all the waste statistics (i.e. relating to the generation of waste, its recovery and disposal) on an annual basis instead of the three-yearly basis proposed by the Commission. The committee also demanded figures for waste imports and exports to prevent waste from being dumped outside the EU. Amongst its other amendments, it rejected the two-year transition period offered by the Commission to the Member States, sought to prevent Member States from withholding data on certain items of waste, put animal waste into a separate category for data on recycling and sought to ensure that statisticians and waste experts were involved on an equal footing in compiling the data.�