Bouwkroniek reports on ELFM breakthrough

The work of the European Enhanced Landfill Mining Consortium (EURELCO) has not gone unnoticed. In its recent issue, Bouwkroniek, the Flemish website/magazine for the construction sector, has published a feature article on Enhanced Landfill Mining and the recent breakthrough in the European Parliament with respect to the endorsement of ELFM.

The article reports on the integration of ELFM into the European Parliament’s Waste Package that was formally accepted on March 14, 2017. This “Waste Package” concerns a whole list of measures as regards packaging, recycling, landfill and electronic waste. The agreed “Waste Package” concerns the adaptation of four EU Directives, including the Landfill Directive. This Directive (1999/31/EC) regulates waste management of landfills in the European Union. With the EP vote of March 14, 2017, this is now about to change. For the first time ever, this Landfill Directive is set to include a specific reference to “Enhanced Landfill Mining”. In Article 5, the following paragraph has been added by the European Parliament:

“The Commission shall further examine the feasibility of proposing a regulatory framework for enhanced landfill mining so as to permit the retrieval of secondary raw materials that are present in existing landfills. By 31 December 2025 Member States shall map existing landfills and indicate their potential for enhanced landfill mining and share information.”

The justification for this change is that Enhanced Landfill Mining does not only enable the recovery of valuable materials which can be brought back into the cycle, but also allows for recovering land area, taking into account that a large part of the EU’s 500.000 historic landfills are situated in a (semi-) urban environment. In order to become officially part of the revised EU Landfill Directive, the European Council now needs to agree with the EP’s Waste Package. If not, then negotiations are set to start to revise the EP proposal. In all cases, ELFM is set to be integrated in one way or another in the new EU Landfill Directive.

Read article and webpost of Bouwkroniek here

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