Put pressure on European Ministers to support a Biowaste Directive
Visit the GAIA website to learn more about the Biowaste Directive, and download GAIA’s 9 page briefing entitled Getting it right to drive organics from landfills to material recycling.
GAIA is calling upon waste campaigners to contact those responsible for bio-waste in the UK’s environment ministry and push them to speak out in favour of legislation on bio-waste and to ask the European Commission to start drafting the bio-waste directive regardless of the assessment (which will be heavily lobbied by the incineration industry).
GAIA’s main argument is: We need that legislation says what to do with biodegradables. Current legislation says they should not go to landfills but doesn’t establish a clear preference between incineration and AD or composting.
Their briefing paper includes the following:
- Diverting organics from landfills should not incentivize incineration to compete with reuse, recycling and composting.
- Targets for diversion of biodegradables from residual treatment – landfill and incineration – will steer biowaste treatment to the next level of the hierarchy and will trigger better separate collection, proper clean energy from biowaste via AD and will turn compost into a product.
- Energy from waste incineration continues the oldfashioned approach of linear throwaway society and encourages waste production. In contrast, clean energy from biowaste produced in anaerobic digesters and compost facilities is a change of paradigm since it goes in the direction of a systemic society where resources are not destroyed but
transformed plus it doesn’t create the environmental and health hazard posed by incineration.
Furthermore, GAIA are calling for the reduction of biodegradable waste going to incineration to:
- 75% of figures of 2009 by 2012
- 50% of figures of 2009 by 2015
- 25% of figures of 2009 by 2020
- 0% incineration of biodegradables by 2025