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Outlooks: Municipal Waste

Released: 2007/04/30: See The full report

This paper presents the ETC/RWM project, Environmental outlooks, which estimates municipal waste generation in the EU for the years 2005-2020 and the associated environmental pressures from the management of this waste.

According to the estimation, generation of municipal waste in the 25 EU Member States (excluding Romania and Bulgaria) is projected to increase by 25% by 2020 compared to 2002. However, large differences exist between countries and between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Member States.

The environmental pressures (greenhouse gases) from waste management shows that direct emissions from landfill first will decrease and then stabilise up to 2020, while direct emissions from incineration and material recovery will increase. Further reductions of greenhouse gases from landfills are foreseen, since from 2009 all landfills in the EU that accept biodegradable waste have to be equipped with methane emission reduction systems following Annex 1 of the Landfill Directive. The indirect emissions will be accounted for in 2008 (e.g. savings of CO2 emissions in other sectors: energy production from incineration with energy recovery and manufacture of virgin materials).

This paper consists of; a baseline projection on the quantities of municipal waste from 2005-2030, a baseline projection of the management of municipal waste, a model for projecting environmental pressures and a baseline scenario of the greenhouse gasses occurring form the waste management. Finally, this paper presents potential improvements to the model.

ETC/RWM working papers are Topic Centre analyses and findings, which have been prepared as part of the work programme for the EEA but which are not scheduled for publication under one of the EEA publication serials. As the studies represent a valuable contribution to knowledge sharing within the field of resource and waste management in Europe, it has been chosen to disseminate the information in the form of a working paper. Available in electronic format only.