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2.3 Topic h: Management and planning

More than any other region in the world, Western Europe has endorsed, and largely implemented, integrated waste management. Western European governments are generally required to design their waste management systems around the proverbial waste management hierarchy, with waste prevention given the highest priority, followed by reuse, recycling, materials recovery, energy recovery, and disposal as the last resort. There is some variation, even within the European Union. For example, while most Northern European nations give materials recovery a higher priority than energy recovery, France does not distinguish between them, and assigns them equal weight in keeping materials out of landfills.

Western European governments support integrated waste management in another way as well. With some exceptions, the financing of waste management is usually arranged or supplemented at the national level, and this national financing ensures that the national policy priorities become incorporated into solid waste management systems. It also ensures that all aspects of the system are financed together, with mechanisms such as diversion credits providing incentives for recycling. As a consequence of this integrated approach to waste management, Europe has more experience with waste prevention than other regions, and recycling and materials recovery are well supported in Northern Europe. This is much less true in the southern EU countries and in the transition economies of Eastern Europe

Europe is, in general, a densely populated region with many old cities and mature settlements. There can be said to be more than a thousand years - 2,000 in some cases - of experience with the public health and commercial consequences of inadequate urban sanitation. European governments, perhaps as a consequence, accept the role of the public sector at the local, regional, and in some cases national levels, in taking responsibility for waste management. This stance has been confirmed in recent court contests over European Commission solid waste directives. In addition, the generally social democratic cast of European national and regional governments tends to bolster both governmental and public expectations that the public sector is the prime mover in waste management. However, as described under "Financing," below, governments are increasingly turning to the private sector to carry out waste management services. In Eastern Europe, formerly state-owned enterprises are undergoing a variety of transformations, generally in the direction of greater private sector involvement.

Waste management planning and policy decisions in Europe are generally done at the level of national ministries, which respond to political pressure for environmental protection and the need for clean air and water. The often lofty goals of these ministries sometimes conflict with the more mundane missions of local authorities, who have to manage the flow of waste on a daily basis.

Most European national environmental ministries, even those of countries that are not members of the European Community, are planning and making policy in response to current or anticipated European Union (EU) directives. However, these directives may be too expensive for Eastern European countries to follow fully. In recent years, the EU has issued directives on incineration, landfilling, solid waste and recycling, and packaging waste. The structure of these directives generally gives national governments a general mandate, numerical performance targets, and a certification or documentation procedure. A number of EU waste directives require planning processes in relation to waste management, as do some national waste laws and regulations.

In general, the impact of grassroots lobbying and activism in Europe can be felt more at the national level than at the level of local programs, although decision-making processes at the national, regional, and local levels vary so widely within Europe, and even within the European Union, as to make generalization impossible. Countries like France have highly centralized decision-making processes, while those like the UK leave most decisions to the local authorities. Specific local programming decisions may be broadly consultative, as they are in the Netherlands, responsive to adversarial citizen action, as in Great Britain, or less attentive to citizen input, as they are in Spain. In Northern Europe, implementation and monitoring tend to occur within the framework of a generally consensus-oriented culture, where noncompliance is the exception, rather than the rule.

The main research and scientifically oriented monitoring projects are performed by national institutes, such as RIVM in the Netherlands, or the Umweltbundesamt in Germany; these may also take place at technical universities or other academic institutions. These institutes both define research programs and respond to suggestions and proposals from consulting and independent research organizations to investigate particular problems or monitor the success of new programs.

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