REPORT FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE COUNCIL AND THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
on the implementation of Council Regulation (EEC) No 259/93 of 1 February 1993 on the supervision and control of shipments of waste within, into and out of the European Community
Generation, treatment and transboundary shipment of hazardous waste and other waste in the Member States of the European Union, 1997-2000 {SEC(2006) 1053}
SUMMARY REPORT: DEVELOPMENTS CONCERNING GENERATION, TREATMENT AND SHIPMENT OF HAZARDOUS WASTE AND OTHER WASTE IN THE EU MEMBER STATES
1. INTRODUCTION
Waste exports and imports are governed at international level by the Basel Convention of 22 March 1989 on the control of transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal. The European Community is a party to this Convention and has transposed it by Council Regulation (EEC) No 259/931 , the so-called Waste Shipment Regulation. In force since May 1994, its purpose is to organise the supervision and control of shipments of wastes in a way which takes account of the need to preserve, protect and improve the quality of the environment.
Based on the guiding principles of the Community's strategy on waste management, in particular prevention, recovery and final disposal, the Regulation lays down a series of rules which should enable the Community as a whole to dispose of its own waste and the Member States individually to move towards that goal, taking into account geographical circumstances and the need for specialised installations to handle certain types of waste.
The Regulation has introduced a number of measures for achieving control of the shipments of waste within, out of and into the Community. In particular:
it establishes common definitions and terminology conCERNing shipments of waste;
it lays down rules for the export, import, and transit of wastes for disposal or recovery;
it specifies the information which the Member States and the Commission must supply.
Article 41 of the Regulation lays down that:
(1) "Before the end of each calendar year, Member States shall draw up a report in accordance with Article 13(3) of the Basel Convention and send it to the Secretariat of the Basel Convention and a copy hereof to the Commission.
(2) The Commission shall, based on these reports, establish every three years a report on the implementation of this Regulation by the Community and its Member States. It may request to this end additional information in accordance with Article 6 of Directive 91/692/EEC ."
Pursuant to their obligation, most of the Member States have sent annual reports to the Commission on the supervision and control of shipments of waste. Table 1 in the Annex shows a list of the Member States who submitted the Basel Convention report to the
Of 1 February 1993 on the supervision and control of shipments of waste within, into and out of the European Community, OJ L 30, 6.2.1993, p.1, last amended by Commission Regulation (EC) No 2557/2001 of 28 December 2001, OJ L 349, 31.12.2001, p. 1. Commission. This table does not reflect, however, to which extent the questionnaire was filled in. Not every country has given all the information that was required.
The questionnaire of the Basel Convention Secretariat includes questions on legal provisions, implementation, and measures of environmental protection. Triennially, the Commission must draw up a report containing the information supplied be the Member States. The report should make it possible to assess the extent to which the transboundary shipment of wastes is being controlled throughout the Community. In this case, data for the year 2000 have also been included where available. The delay in delivering this report is due to the fact that information from some Member States arrived very late, and to a concentration of human resources in the Commission on the legislative revision of the Waste Shipment Regulation during the years 2002-2004.
On the basis of Article 41(2), the Commission in 1999 adopted a Decision2 requiring additional information to be supplied by Member States in the form of a questionnaire. The first such reports should have covered data for the year 2000. Information from that source has not yet been integrated in this Commission Report but will be in the following one.
It should be noted that the Basel Convention uses the terms "import" and "export" for every shipment in and out of an individual country that is Party to the Convention, whereas under EU law these terms apply only to shipments in and out of the European Union as a whole. Shipments from one EU Member State to another will therefore not be called "import" and "export" in the main part of this report. They do, however, appear in the Annexes in the sense as used in the Basel Convention where they refer to the headings of the Basel Convention questionnaire.
Furthermore, it should be taken into account that the Waste Shipment Regulation and the Basel Convention have differing systems of waste classification, so that the definitions of hazardous waste and the types of waste that are subject to notification procedures are not quite the same. The data received from Member States pursuant to the Basel Convention should therefore not be taken as information geared to the purposes of the Waste Shipment Regulation. They will be used in this report to sum up the main trends in generation, treatment, and transboundary shipment of hazardous waste and other waste in the EU Member States for the given period.
In some cases, where data from Member States were corrected in later reports, this was taken into account. Where a Member State had not sent the required information to the Commission, the gaps were filled, as far as possible and appropriate, with data from the study on "Global Trends" published by the Secretariat of the Basel Convention in 20023, and from the statistics of Eurostat.4 This has remained the exception, however, as the database of Eurostat is similarly incomplete and focuses on different aspects, particularly the economic added value of waste. The present Summary Report presents the essential results of the quantitative data that were reported on the shipment of waste to and from the EU Member States. This comprises data on generation, import, export, and treatment of hazardous waste and other waste. In order to keep the Report itself brief and facilitate its distribution, all data tables and figures are to be found in Annex A.
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