Hazardous Waste Europe is a member of the Zero Pollution Stakeholders Platform. During the High Level Launch Meeting, on December 16th, our President delivered the HWE’s core message: Hazardous Waste Europe is a EU business association of hazardous waste operators present on the whole value chain of hazardous waste management, from collection to final treatment. We treat pollution of all kinds by providing hazardous waste its appropriate treatment. It can be regeneration, recycling, material recovery, hazardous waste incineration, physico-chemical treatments specifically of wastewaters, soil remediation, and hazardous waste landfilling. We operate IED and SEVESO installations and we have expertise in the treatment of the most harmful chemicals including those internationally recognised like POPs and mercury. As we stand at the end of the value chain, we definitively act as the last bastion to destroy toxicity, limit dispersion of pollutants in the environment and we ensure non-toxic recycling. It is our responsibility. Our existence results from the necessity to manage all unavoidable hazardous waste inherent to our way of living even though we expect it to be much more sustainable and resilient in the future. Consequently and according to the zero-pollution hierarchy, our commitment in the platform would mainly bring expertise in Eliminate & Remediate and Minimise & Control. HWE expects the Platform to develop operational tools supporting stakeholders benchmarking their
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The Chemicals strategy aims at strengthening the EU legal framework to address pressing environmental and health concerns through the revision of the REACH and CLP Regulations. Following the impact assessment and roadmap, the Commission consulted citizens and stakeholders as part of the targeted revision of the CLP regulation. Our particular position at the interface between products, chemicals and waste has given us specific experiences to share concerns and proposals on the revision of the CLP regulation in order to protect health and the environment and pave the way towards a non toxic environment. You will learn below our main points: Our main challenge is to acknowledge the distinction between waste and products, justifying different approaches between them and the relevance to keep separate classification. As stakeholders acting at the very end of the economic chain, our experience demonstrated that once a product becomes waste, it is not always easy to know for sure its final destination. A product is designed for a known specific use, with a use scenario, making it relevant to apply a risk based approach that will validate that there are no adverse risks for this use. On the contrary, a waste could not be oriented for sure towards one expected route and many different choices are available between recycling, recovery or disposal, depending on the quality
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Hazardous waste Europe really welcomes the outcome of the draft report on the preliminary recommendations for Technical Screening Criteria (TSC) for the EU taxonomy developed by the Technical Working Group of the platform on Sustainable Finance. We fully endorse the high level of ambition in the TSCs for separate collection, transport and treatment of hazardous waste as a means for pollution prevention and control (subchapters 13.1, 13.2 & 13.3): 👍Ensure strict separation of hazardous waste from non-hazardous waste for collection & transport 👍Avoid blending or mixing leading to dilution of hazardous waste and consequences due to inappropriate treatments 👍Ban organic hazardous waste in facilities treating hazardous waste prior to hazardous waste landfilling 👍Prevent or reduce at the minimum the discharge of priority substances and priority hazardous substances in water bodies due to indirect discharge via inappropriate wastewater treatment plants 👍Avoid mismanagement of POP waste, mercury waste and problematic health care waste 👍Guaranty that facilities benefiting from derogations under article 15.4 to the IED will never be taxonomy-aligned HWE would have liked to see the same level of ambition in other sectors (at least regarding derogations mentioned just above…) whose core business is not the treatment of hazardous waste but where hazardous waste end in conditions which lead to uneven playing field with our sector dedicated to the treatment of hazardous
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To pave the way towards « a zero pollution ambition for a toxic-free environment », the EU Green Deal annonced the objective of the EU commission to look more systematically at all policies and regulations and adopt in 2021 a zero pollution action plan for air, water and soil. Find HWE’s proposals to ensure that our legislation and principles reach this objective of a non toxic environment :
