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 waste. We hope that our will and our actions to do more and better for a zero pollution ambition in a toxic free environment will be rewarded one day, and why not, thanks to the taxonomy! We are a bit more reserved regarding the subchapter 13.4 on treatment of hazardous waste as a means for material recovery. The ambition is very poor here while circular economy objectives related to hazardous waste also require adopting practices ensuring decontamination from substances of concern for safe recycling and material recovery. An offer of secondary raw materials contaminated by legacy substances will never meet the demand… and consequently circularity will fail to happen! Additionally, it would have been obvious to us that battery recycling should be explicitly nominated here considering the importance of this activity in the European industrial strategy!
To be continued with chapters #2 and #3…
Download here the Draft report by the Platform on Sustainable Finance on preliminary recommendations for technical screening criteria for the EU taxonomy