The European Parliament has voted to approve the revised Waste Framework Directive, meaning it should soon become law. The revised Directive will require Member States to achieve a 50% re-use and recycling target for certain household waste such as paper, metal, plastic and glass, and a 70% target for non-hazardous construction and demolition waste.
It outlines an obligation to develop national waste prevention programmes and sets a five-step "hierarchy" of waste management options according to which prevention is the first option, followed by re-use, recycling, other forms of recovery and then disposal as a last resort. It will also clarify a number of important definitions, such as "recovery", "recycling" and "waste" itself. Under the revised Directive, incineration could be classed a recovery operation providing it meets certain energy efficiency standards.
Perhaps most crucially, the Directive will revoke and replace the following:
Also this month, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) have published a consultation paper setting out the purpose and scope of Directive 2006/118/EC, on the protection of groundwater and presented proposals for its implementation through an amendment to the Groundwater Regulations SI 1998/2746.
These amendments include measures to prevent inputs of all hazardous substances to groundwater and limit inputs of non-hazardous substances. As a result the scope of substances covered will be greater than those currently contained in the List 1 and List 2 substances. Responses can be made to this consultation until 20 August 2008, which is an important stage in bringing groundwater authorisations under the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations SI 2007/3538.
