Tag: recycling

In the Bangladesh port city of Chittagong, activists want the EU to get tough on the booming ship recycling industry that has become notorious for its poor labour and environmental safety records. New EU legislation is already in the making and could be finalised in June.

Recycling and composting of waste grew in the last decade across Europe, but most countries still dump the bulk of their garbage despite their obligations to recycle half of trash by 2020, new EU statistics show.

SPECIAL REPORT / Six months after the Rio+20 Earth Summit, a Belgian company, Deceuninck Nv., has begun living up to the plastic industry's voluntary commitments by turning discarded doors, windows and other goods made with PVC into new products.

SPECIAL REPORT / Industrial and environmental groups are lining up to pressure the European Commission on how best to measure resource efficiency. Businesses have warned that a one-size-fits-all approach will hamper economic growth at a time when Europe strives to emerge from its sovereign debt crisis.

Shipbreaking on the beaches of South Asia results in disastrous pollution, labour rights abuses, severe injuries and fatalities among workers. Still, the vast majority of European shipping companies continue to avoid the costs of proper disposal by selling their ships to these breaking yards, writes Patrizia Heidegger.

The EU's roadmap for a resource-efficient Europe received a green light from the European Parliament yesterday (24 May), in a bid to “turn talk into reality” for green economic growth. 

The European Parliament's environment committee backed a proposed resource efficiency roadmap for Europe on 25 April, marking an important step in EU policymakers' efforts to decouple natural resource use from economic growth. However, in an effort to find a compromise, they left aside proposed ambitious deadlines and measures.

Could "green" be the new black? Perhaps only if you can imagine wearing stilettos made from pistachio nuts and coffee beans, and clothes from orange peel, fungi and mould.

Many EU member states are going to miss targets for collecting a quarter of all waste batteries by 2012 and 45% of them by 2016, EurActiv has learned.

In September 2011, Belgium’s first battery recycling plant opened in Hoboken. The €25 million battery recycling and development centre can recover nearly all the elements used in electric and hybrid cars, but so far only two car companies have signed deals with it. Despite the EU batteries directive, recycling lithium is an expensive process and for the moment, the Hoboken plant is operating beneath its capacity.

Central Europe's relatively low rates of recycling represent an untapped potential with easy gains, said participants at a Steel Packaging Summit in Košice. EurActiv Slovakia reports.

Recycling has become a central part of the EU's climate change strategy by helping the bloc to tackle the nearly three billion tonnes of waste produced by Europe annually, much of which enters the atmosphere in the form of CO2 and methane emissions from landfill sites and incineration plants.

Despite a marked improvement in some countries, new statistics show that waste keeps piling up in most EU member states, suggesting that further effort is required for the bloc to become a "recycling society" that avoids waste and uses it as a resource.

A European Commission handbook published on Friday (12 March) hopes to give businesses and politicians the right tools to assess the life cycle of all products and services in order to help boost the green economy. 

An EU strategy on preventing and recycling waste aims to pave the way towards a recycling society by decoupling economic growth from natural resource use. But questions remain over whether the issue should be dealt with at national or European level, and on how to reconcile the EU's ecological and internal market objectives in the long run.

The Parliament and Council are locked in a battle over waste targets, after a trialogue meeting on 2 June in conjunction with the Commission produced no agreement on percentage targets for household and demolition waste.

Our present rate of waste production is unsustainable and thus we urgently need effective waste management aimed at mining this resource, argues Pater Calliafas in a recent analysis on Environmental Research Web.

After difficult negotiations and despite considerable previous disagreement among member states, the Environment Council on 28 June reached an unanimous decision on the revision of the Waste Framework Directive, sparking NGO criticism and industry applause.

MEPs are voting in plenary tomorrow (13 February 2007) on two reports: the EU Waste Directive aims to set binding targets for waste prevention for the first time, while the 'Thematic Strategy on the Prevention and Recycling of Waste' focuses on the long-term EU waste strategy.

The European Court of Justice has ruled the German system of mandatory return and deposit of drink packages illegal on the basis that it imposes disproportionate trade restrictions on other EU producers.

While approving the Commission's approach on waste prevention, environment ministers have avoided the thorny issues of targets. Market-based instruments have been left to Member States to decide.

The Commission adopted on 27 May a Communication preparing a comprehensive Thematic Strategy on prevention and recycling of waste.