Environment Commissioner, Janez Potočnik, is an ambitious and tenacious man. In the dying days of this Commission, he is trying to push out perhaps his most ambitious law to date and overhaul Europe’s Waste law.
One of the last acts of his fellow Commissioners will be to back a call to effectively ban the landfill of household waste by 2030. Recycling targets across the board will be ratcheted up.
You would have thought that the Commission would not try and push out a major initiative in its dying days in office. And, whilst that is the normal rule of the Commission, like all good rules, there are exceptions, and here the President voiced support for the unwritten initiative before, so the current Commissioners are going to bind their successors with an ambitious new policy and draft law.
The Commission’s internal sign off process to proposed laws, known as Inter Service Consultation, is carried out in relative secrecy. It seems to have started on 27 May and it will last 15 working days (weekends and public holidays excluded). It will be interesting to see many objections come in from other services.
The Environment Commissioner has a good track of getting proposals out that he wants. Other Commissioners will have their eyes focused on post-Commission life. Commissioner Tajani, whose DG Enterprise Department, did so much work to block DG Environment’s initiatives, is now a MEP. It will be interesting to see if others inside the Commission, Governments or industry raise question marks about an outgoing Commission pushing out ambitious legislative proposals in their last moments in office.
Banning landfill will be a very tough act for some countries to ever meet. If adopted, local authorities may need to re-open long term waste recovery contracts with waste management companies who’ll need to invest in state of the art technology to divert household waste. Households will land up paying any additional prices for their waste collection. Many governments, still operating under tough fiscal restraints, will find it hard to pay for necessary infrastructure improvements.
This overhaul of Europe’s convoluted waste regulation regime will be one of the first new pieces of legislation for a new European Parliament to consider.