Waste management hierarchy
The waste management hierarchy is one of the most important tools that the Waste Framework Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC) establishes to achieve its goals, and it is indispensable to establish a truly circular economy.
It aims to be used in the evaluation of waste management processes intended to protect the environment alongside resource and energy consumption from most favourable to least favourable actions, establishing preferred program priorities based on sustainability.
The waste management hierarchy indicates an order of preference for action to reduce and manage waste and is usually presented diagrammatically in the form of a pyramid.
On its article 4 of the Waste Framework Directive establishes 5 steps for the water management hierarchy:
- Prevention: It is based on preventing and reducing waste generation as the first option to manage wastes.
- Reuse and preparation for reuse: This action intends to give the products a second life before they even become waste.
- Recycle: When products have become a waste, they should go be recycled, going through an operation by which they are reprocessed into products, materials, or substances whether for the original or other purposes.
- Recovery: Some waste incineration is based on a political non-scientific formula that upgrades the less inefficient incinerators.
- Disposal: When no other action can be taken to manage a waste, it must be disposed of in a landfill, incinerated, gasified, or apply any other final solution.
The Waste Framework Directive obliges, except in cases that may require specific waste streams, to depart from the hierarchy and justify it based on life cycle thinking. However, this is currently not yet being fulfilled in some Member States. For instance, recycling rates for household waste vary from 70% in some areas to less than 20% in others.
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