"It is no longer enough to look green, now you have to be green and prove it". Miguel Varela shares his vision through this article on how it is increasingly important that the producing company takes responsibility for the waste it produces until its final treatment. European waste regulations with rigorous control of traceability and increased obligations for waste producers create a new scenario in which economic opportunities also arise.
In the early morning of May 13, 2016, a terrible fire broke out at the Seseña tire dump, between Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha. 90,000 tons of tires illegally stored in a facility that had accumulated complaints were consumed by the flames, causing a toxic smoke that forced the evacuation of thousands of local residents.
Many developing countries end up becoming the easy way to make waste from richer countries disappear. Examples include the fast fashion cemetery in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where tons of clothing and textile waste accumulate unchecked; the Agbogbloshie e-waste dump in Ghana; or plastic waste that ends up in Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines. However, INTERPOL warns that crimes related to waste trafficking are highly profitable and are only growing.
What do the Seseña fire have in common with the e-waste dump in Ghana or the clothing cemetery in Atacama? Control and inspection issues aside, all these situations have a common cause: the lack of responsibility of the companies that produced these wastes. Because these wastes did not magically appear in a landfill in a developing country, they have an origin with names and surnames.
You won't hear it in these words but, unfortunately, this is the attitude of many companies when it comes to managing their waste: "waste is only my problem when it's indoors". Once the waste leaves my facility, I pass the problem on to someone else. Quiet conscience.
To avoid pollution problems arising from illegal waste management, problems that end up seriously affecting people's health, it is essential that the producing company takes responsibility for the waste it produces until its final treatment.
The European regulatory tsunami on waste is along these lines: rigorous control of traceability from the source to the last treatment and increased duties of waste producers, who must take responsibility for diligent waste management. This is nothing new: principles such as proximity, precaution or the popular "polluter pays" are the pillars of environmental legislation.
Not to mention the economic opportunities that arise from encouraging waste to go through the right channels to be reintegrated as resources in the circular economy or the pressures of consumers and markets, which are increasingly demanding with regard to companies' environmental criteria: it is no longer enough to appear green, now you have to be green and prove it.
Article 15 of the Waste Framework Directive 2008/98 establishes two important concepts related to the duties and responsibilities of the waste producer:
In this way, each State can decide to what extent it places the focus on the producer, the origin of the waste. This responsibility can be total until the final treatment of the waste, shared with the other participants in the waste value chain or delegated once the waste is handed over to a waste manager, regardless of the treatment applied to it.
Shared producer responsibility has been in place for years in countries such as France, the United Kingdom and Germany(we recommend this comparative study by ASEGRE from a few years ago).
This model increases the producer's commitment to the management and proper treatment of waste, decouples it in part from purely economic criteria and encourages control and self-awareness of the volume of waste produced, which undoubtedly stimulates companies to improve their waste management, for example:
In Spain, the change to the shared responsibility model is recent, since the publication of Law 7/2022 on waste and contaminated soils for a circular economy (LERSEC). In its Article 20 on the obligations of the initial producer or other holder, it states that when the waste is delivered to an intermediate manager or dealer, the responsibility of the initial producer or holder of the waste ends when the complete and final treatment is duly documented . Intermediate treatment operations are also clarified: recovery R12 and R13 and disposal operations D8, D9, D13, D14 and D15, according to Annexes I and II of the EC Waste Framework Directive 2008/98.
Scarcity of raw materials and resources. Growing population. Global warming. Circular economy. Servitization. Green Deal. Decarbonization and digitalization ... concepts that resonate more and more in these convulsive 20s that saw the light of day during the COVID-19 health crisis.
Waste, traditionally the Cinderella of the environmental sector, properly treated and transformed into resources is a fundamental elementfor reducing greenhouse gases that cause global warming, generating new business models, economic flows and jobs and, above all, for protecting the health of ecosystems and the people who inhabit the planet, something we sometimes forget.
The responsibility of the waste producer up to its final treatment is undoubtedly one of the most effective tools to achieve precisely this. There is still a long way to go, but more and more organizations are deciding to go a step further in terms of waste management.
Is it over to take out the trash and forget about it? We'll see.
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