The Case for Increasing Recycling

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Introduction:

There is significant potential to increase the material collected for recycling in Europe’s construction and demolition, municipal, and electronic waste streams. The municipal and electronic waste streams have the potential to double the amounts recycled, and recycling of construction and demolition waste has the potential to increase by 30 %.

The most important barrier to increasing recycling of these waste streams is the low market price of natural resources/virgin raw materials. Next is the mixed and complex composition of some waste products, which makes the recovery and reuse of materials from waste challenging.

Regulations requiring more frequent and higher quality separate collections, extended producer responsibility schemes and selective demolition practices can effectively exploit the potential for further increasing recycling. Such initiatives should be coupled with measures to improve the economics of recycling, remove hazardous substances from products and apply design-for-recycling concepts.

Existing targets in EU legislation already set a high standard, as they aim to harness much of the currently untapped recycling potential. For example, the existing recycling targets for municipal waste up to 2035 aim to exploit most of the potential for recycling of this waste stream.

 Municipal waste

Separate collection of municipal waste, stimulated by ambitious EU legislation, is steadily increasing over time. New, higher recycling targets were introduced in the amended Waste Framework Directive in 2018, which indicates even higher separate collection in the future.

Estimate for this stream shows that the potential for increased separate collection of waste is above the future EU targets. If all the potential is harnessed, separate collection rates of around 80 % can be achieved. This means that 111 million tonnes more material could be separately collected (in 2018, recycling stood at 126 million tonnes), based on waste generation in 2018. This untapped potential is mainly linked to food and plastic but also garden and textile wastes.

The amended 2018 Directive introduced a target for recycling of 65 % by 2035.

Waste from electrical and electronic equipment

This is the smallest waste stream, in terms of mass, examined in this briefing. Electronic waste, however, contains valuable resources (e.g. metals and critical raw materials). It is also the waste stream with the lowest recycling rate, mainly because of failures in separately collecting this type of  waste . As electronic waste is composed mainly of metals, plastic and glass, which are routinely recycled (unless they contain hazardous substances), there is a significant opportunity to increase recycling.

The estimation of the maximum collection rate for recycling, unlike the other waste streams, is not based on the stream’s material composition, as the separate collection of this waste is not designed per material but per product category.

Thanks and regards

Chris Brown

Associate Managing Editor

Email: wastemanag@scholarlypub.com

Twitter: @advancerecycle