Waste disposal

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Disposal is the generic term for all processes and activities of the disposal or recycling of wastes are used.

Among waste is understood to mean the release to the environment in compliance with prescribed limits (mostly in liquid and gaseous waste, optionally after prior chemical conversion or dilution) or the transfer to a repository (typically in solid, especially radioactive , waste, optionally after previous conditioning and packaging ). For the final storage of waste, you need landfills or other suitable final storage sites, for example former mines or salt domes .

Among waste recycling refers to the reuse , the recycling or thermal recycling of waste, or a portion thereof. If the waste is used to fill the cavities and thus, in principle, to prevent damage in the mountains , transportation underground can also be viewed as a form of recovery.

Waste disposal is considered to be one of the greatest environmental problems of the 21st century , especially due to the large amounts of waste it produces.

Waste disposal in Germany

In Germany , all types of waste have been defined in the Waste Catalog Ordinance (AVV) since December 2001 . In this regulation on the European waste catalog, wastes are designated and classified according to their need for monitoring and hazard, e.g. based on the content of hazardous substances. The Waste Catalog Ordinance is the basis for waste disposal.

Waste management

Disposal is the central part of waste management.

This includes, for example, the collection and transport of waste by garbage collection , recycling processes for the recovery of secondary raw materials , incineration in waste incineration plants to generate energy or dumping in landfills. The systems for collecting, storing and treating are called disposal systems in urban planning .

The disposal company waste management companies before, which are either in public or private. Special requirements are placed on the disposal of hazardous waste . The 1994 Recycling and Waste Management Act provides for three disposal routes:

  • Path 1 follows the principle: Every waste owner must dispose of his waste himself, i. H. Collect them separately, recycle or deposit them after pre-treatment (volume reduction and destruction of pollutants, especially in waste incineration plants). This corresponds to the polluter pays principle . Because of the exceptions described below, mainly craftsmen and tradespeople are self-disposal. They either have their own disposal systems - like the chemical industry - or they employ a private disposal company. For hazardous waste, the federal states can stipulate the use of municipal special-purpose associations. One speaks of the compulsory connection and use .
  • Path 2 takes into account the fact that private households cannot dispose of the small amounts of household waste they generate themselves. The disposal of household waste and household-type waste has traditionally been assigned to the municipalities. Waste similar to household rubbish occurs in restaurants and hospitals , for example . Food often has the same packaging, regardless of whether it is used in a restaurant or in private households. The independent cities and districts , which have come together to form waste special purpose associations in some regions, are responsible. You can perform this sovereign task yourself (see municipal municipal cleaning services ) or employ private waste management companies as so-called vicarious agents. This applies to all waste disposal measures, namely the collection, sorting, recycling and / or treatment and disposal of this waste. Most municipalities have recycling plants only for green waste ( composting plants ). At the beginning of the 1990s there were bottlenecks in the area of ​​waste incineration plants and landfills. That is why municipalities began to collect so-called recyclable materials separately, for example plastic packaging . It turned out that although the municipalities were willing to pay if operators of recycling plants took over the plastic, there were hardly any buyers for this material.
  • Path 3 was set up in 1994 at the suggestion of Federal Environment Minister Klaus Töpfer . The exception (path 3) from the exception (see path 2) obliges manufacturers and distributors of packaging and other products to take them back and dispose of them themselves. With this so-called producer responsibility, the legislature has reinstated the polluter pays principle. He assumed that manufacturers only take environmental aspects into account when designing products when they have to bear the disposal costs themselves. Of course, they try to pass these costs on to consumers through the prices of their products . But those who lower these costs have a competitive advantage by z. B. uses less packaging material, dispenses with composite packaging that is difficult to recycle (this is how cardboard and plastic are glued in the blister ), the number of types of plastic used in the construction of a car is reduced and it ensures that an old car can be easily dismantled .

The pilot project was the packaging ordinance. Retailers and manufacturers set up the Dual System Deutschland (DSD or Grüner Punkt ) in order to record the packaging in the yellow sack or the yellow bin separately. After sorting, recovery quotas had to be met and verified. Only after years was it possible to solve the problems associated with this new disposal system with the help of retailers, and in Germany an exemplary infrastructure of recycling plants was available worldwide. Product responsibility now also applies to household appliances , electronics , motor vehicles , etc.

Since the end of the monopoly by the Federal Cartel Office and the EU , the problems in the packaging sector have been increasing again. The now admitted competition favors so-called free riders , i.e. producers who only claim to have set up their own collection and processing system outside of DSD. The Packaging Ordinance now allows so many variants that state supervision is no longer able to control the flow of recyclable materials. In the amendment to the Recycling Management Act 2012, the main question was whether, in future, recyclable materials that are not packaging should also be recorded using a uniform recycling bin, a yellow bin plus, so to speak. The advantages are obvious: All of these recyclable materials are already being sent to the same recycling facilities. The municipalities and private disposal companies argued and argue about who should be responsible for this bin. The municipalities are currently responsible for non-plastic packaging, etc., while the manufacturers are responsible for packaging. If it stays that way, you have to agree on organizational issues (award of the collection and sorting services) and on a cost sharing. The municipal associations sometimes expect profits and are more or less openly calling for the recycling bin to be remunicipalised: in doing so, they are questioning producer responsibility. The waste management associations refer to their competencies and capacities in the recycling sector, wanting to deprive the municipalities of their final responsibilities in the field of household waste recycling.

Waste law

Since some waste is a matter of problematic substances , which can endanger the environment if improperly handled, disposal is regulated by numerous national and international laws and regulations. Examples are:

In German waste law, the Recycling Management Act (KrWG) is the central federal law for regulating the handling of waste and its environmentally friendly disposal. The law came into effect on October 7, 1996. With this new waste law, the avoidance of waste was demanded more than ever before and Germany finally managed to enter the circular economy . This aims to completely return the raw materials used to the production process beyond the product life cycle of a product.

The most important legal regulations of the Recycling Management Act are the

Jurisprudence

After the German Federal Administrative Court ruled on the requirements for commercial waste collections on June 18, 2009, the Hanover Administrative Court decided in 2010 that private households must in principle hand over all their household waste (including waste paper ) to the public waste disposal authorities: municipalities can collect ( also forbid private waste paper collections).

When appealing to the above judgment of the VG Hannover, a waste disposal company was chosen for formal reasons. The Lower Saxony Higher Administrative Court in Lüneburg lifted on 21 March 2013, the prohibition of the district Holzminden on to the disposal operation Wessarges & Hundertmark, as the district according to § 42 para. 4 of the Lower Saxony Waste Management Act (NAbfG) this was not competent. The reason for this was that the Holzminden district and its municipal waste management company had acted “on their own behalf”. Instead of the district, the highest waste authority (in Lower Saxony the Ministry for the Environment, Energy and Climate Protection ) would have been responsible for issuing an order .

See also

literature

  • Erwin Thomanetz: Salt preservation of waste with a high TOC for underground transportation in salt formations. In: Müll und Abfall , Volume 36, No. 11, 2004, pp. 559-562, ISSN  0027-2957
  • Walter Leidinger, Joachim Beyer: Possibilities and limits of different methods of hazardous waste incineration. In: Environmental sciences and pollutant research . Volume 17, No. 2, 2005, pp. 59-63, ISSN  0934-3504
  • Thorsten Pitschke, Wolfgang Rommel, Udo Roth, Sarah Hottenroth, Martin Frede: Eco-efficiency of public waste disposal structures . In: Müll und Abfall 36 (9), 2004, pp. 420-429, ISSN  0027-2957
  • Ralf Röger : Legal issues of waste disposal in the area of ​​tension between ecology and economy . Carl Heymanns, 2001, ISBN 3-452-24878-X
  • Gerhard Friedrich: EU enforces new recycling law . In: Journal for Legal Policy , issue 4/2011 of May 12, 2011, p. 108 ff.

Web links

Commons : Waste Disposal  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Waste disposal  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. BVerwG, judgment of June 18, 2009, Az. 7 C 16.08, full text .
  2. ^ VG Hannover, decision of February 17, 2010, Az. 12 B 5464/09, full text (Wessarges & Hundertmark case against the district of Holzminden).
  3. ^ OVG Lüneburg, judgment of March 21, 2013, Az. 7 LB 56/11, full text .
  4. Private waste paper supplier wins against prohibition order .