Waste sorting at the source

National laws and standards are fully sufficient for all kinds of waste management that do not cross borders. For this very clear reason, EU should stay completely away from defining waste management rules over the heads of member states. The only exception is concerning waste that crosses borders. Examples of this are, waste that is dumped or lost into rivers and waterways that carry unwanted material across borders into other countries, be they other member states or non-EU members. Waste can also be intentionally exported, which definitely should be regulated by EU. The same goes for exports to third world countries, that is dumping of trash such as plastic for recycling or incineration in unhealthy and polluting facilities.

These exceptions aside, there is no reason that waste handling can not be sufficiently regulated by member states themselves. The current state of the matter is that the Directive sets a low but skewed standard that mainly serves as a goal for member states that have not yet reached a certain standard for waste handling. Other countries have higher standards, but the way of achieving the desired standard is different. Differences concerning local conditions of geography, logistics, existing traditional practices, full-chain thinking about end-to-end waste handling, are not considered by the Directive. Indeed, it should not, because there is no advantage of living up to the same standard in all member countries. There may be an argument that waste handling adds to product costs and thus has an impact on cost and price competition. But that impact is negligible compared to using the most cost-efficient handling methods, based on local choices. The market is rational and will choose the best solution. If some countries opt to have lover and more unsane waste treatment plans, they sure will suffer from the results themselves, such as garbage disposal sites that are very unattractive. Again, the limit is if some roughe member states want to export garbage in order to bring it out of sight, that should be prohibited (which it currently is not, at least not completely). Thus, there still is an incentive for solving the problem domestically while maintaining the sovereignty of member states on a matter that the EU cannot solve optimally with a generic, one size fits all DIrective.

Here are some examples from the real world:

First of all, it is not necesary to sort all plastic and metal from general household garbage. All the flammable is much more efficiently burnt in modern inceneration, energy producing plants. Electricity and district heating, a very good alternative to burning fossil fuels in the pauses when wind and solar are not producing enough energy to satisfy the demand. Sorting at the source can even be wasteful and costly for no reason.

Second, sorting at the source is not effective and efficient compared to central sorting. Robots are much better at sorting in many different fractions and with much less error than humans sorting at the source. It is more efficient than source sorting even when not including the cost of having deperate containers in households and seperate garbage collection lines, including trucks and offloading facilities.

So why do we not simply forfeit this type of wasteful overcomplication of the garbage collection logistics? The answer is, that Parliament and Commission eagerly have been pursuing this wasteful approach for years. Now that is has turned into law in many countries, it has been realized that it was a bad decision. But EU decisions are not easy to change, and nobody wants to take responsibility for the mistake. Politicians never make mistakes, we know that. EU officials are masters of spin and will always find a way to explain that maybe it was not completely correct, but we will introduce a few adjustments that will completely solve all alleged problems.