Waste Framework Directive 75/442/EEC. Follow-up report

The committee adopted the own-initiative report drawn up by Hans BLOKLAND (EDD, NL) in response to the Commission's follow-up report on the implementation of Community waste legislation. It concluded that in general Member States did not take their reporting requirements seriously enough and called on the Commission to initiate proceedings against Member States whose reports still display serious shortcomings. It said that, due to the inadequate reports submitted, there was still no clear picture of the extent to which the Framework Directive had been implemented and the objectives achieved. The committee therefore urged Member States which are not satisfactorily implementing or are delaying the application of directives on waste to implement them, and called on the Commission to make optimum use of its powers to ensure this, including opening infringement proceedings against all Member States which still had illegal or unsupervised waste-disposal sites. The report called on all the Member States to: incorporate the definition of waste laid down in the framework directive into their national legislation; draw up or - where appropriate - improve waste management plans; make greater efforts to prevent and reduce waste generation; find ways to promote separate collection of recyclable waste; and make available sufficient incineration capacity for domestic refuse, recovering energy from it. It added that domestic refuse intended for incineration should not be exported to other Member States or to non-EU countries. MEPs pointed out that different market conditions exist in the EU - for example, there is no ban on dumping of waste in Belgium (Wallonia), Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK. Taxes on dumping of waste differ between Member States and no such tax even exists in a number of countries. The Commission was urged to check that the waste directives were implemented in such a way as to prevent unfair competition due to cost differentials, to ensure that waste was not channelled towards environmentally-inferior treatment operations. Lastly, the committee regretted that the Commission had not yet adopted proposals to develop a set of quantitative and qualitative reduction targets covering all relevant waste, to be achieved at Community level by 2010. �