Research Paper on "Lobbying Waste Management in the European Union"

Research Paper 12 pages (3796 words) Sources: 12 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Public Relations

Lobbying Waste Management in the European Union

As European civilization has increased in wealth it has produced more and more trash. Each year in the European Union alone they dispose of three billion tonnes of waste including some ninety million tonnes of hazardous waste. This makes up about six tonnes of solid waste for person. It is obvious that treating and getting rid of all this stuff, without doing harm to the environment, is a big issue. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), between 1990 and 1995 the quantity of trash produced in Europe went up by ten percent. The majority of what is thrown away is either burnt in incinerators, or dumped into landfill sites. But both these techniques generate environmental harm. Land filling not only takes up a lot of precious land space, it also creates air, water and soil pollution, releasing carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) into the air and chemicals and pesticides into the ground and groundwater. This, in turn, is damaging to humans, as well as to plants and animals (Waste, 2011).

Environment groups have cautioned that Eastern Europe is overwhelmed with grave and potentially hazardous waste disposal troubles as new statistics reveal the area has Europe's lowest recycling rates. They say that poor legislation, inadequate infrastructure, lack of environmental consciousness outside cities and a deficiency of political will to take on waste management troubles has led to grave problems with unlawful trash dumping. Jointly with non-existent recycling in some nations, this poses a danger to human health and the environment. In rural areas unlawful dumping is a severe issue. People are not conscious of recycling and waste management, which is something that dates back to communist times. Unlawful dumping poses grave health and environmental risks, while burying certain kinds of waste in landfill sites has its risks as well (Stracansky, 2010).

Services for waste collection and ensuing recycling are also disadvantaged by a lack of money in some areas of the region, predominantly rural areas. Funding for recycling is also an issue for some cities. The CEPTA civic association in Slovakia which endorses sustainable ecological practices maintains that some cities are in fact losing funds on recycling collections and councils and residents have become disinterested and dismayed about a service which CEPTA says costs more than four times as much as other waste collection (Stracansky, 2010).

Recently recycling rates have gone up in the EU. The proportion of waste being gotten rid of in landfills has gone down as a consequence. Nevertheless, landfill continues to be the popular option in a lot of EU countries. Treatment of municipal waste in EU in 1999 was distributed as follows:

57% landfills

16% incineration

20% recycling+ composting

7% others (Europe and Waste, n.d.).

Due to the fact that it has been discovered that waste law is not being appropriately put into practice in several European member states, the European Commission has put out a study as part of a series of actions taken to advance the circumstances. The study suggests the organization of a dedicated European body to manage the implementation and enforcement of waste law. A lot of member states are failing by permitting unlawful dumping of waste, sub-standard landfill sites and a lack of fundamental waste infrastructure. Unlawful shipments are a dilemma too, with another study demonstrating that one fifth of the waste shipment examined were unlawful (European Commission take measures to enforce waste law, 2011).

This study was part of a sequence of steps being taken by the Commission to advance waste management and make sure it meets the principles set by EU legislation to guard people and the environment. Unlawful dumping of waste persists on a large scale, a lot of landfill sites are sub-standard and in some Member States fundamental waste infrastructure is still absent (Dedicated EU body needed to ensure enforcement of European waste law, 2010). The proposed organization would evaluate enforcement systems in member states, and organize control and examination actions. Another European body would be set up to handle severe cases of non-compliance. These suggestions have come about from questionnaires, interviews and workshops conducted with member state officials and stakeholders, and would also force nations to obey with environmental policies relating to carbon emissions, as well as generate a more level playing field in the recyclables and secondary raw resources markets (European Commission take measures to enforce waste law, 2011).

This dedicated agency at the EU level would undertake the underlying troubles of poor execution and enforcement of European waste legislation. The level of the problem has grown in recent years after increases in waste produced and shipped in the bigger EU. In 2008, the European Parliament put into practice a resolution advising the Commission to report on the possibility of putting into place a Community environmental inspection force. The agency would do tasks such as reviewing enforcement systems in EU member states, coordinate controls and inspect actions. This would be united with the formation of a specific European body accountable for direct examinations and controls of facilities and sites in grave cases of non-compliance. A European network of EU member states would sustain the agency in a quantity of actions (Dedicated body needed to enforce EU waste law, European Commission study say, 2010).

National governments have initiated an assortment of environmental laws and, as EU members, Eastern European states are bound to meet values set out by Brussels on waste management. The European Commission is dedicated to augment recycling. But some states are a long way behind on meeting lawful norms, such as EU-wide principles for landfill sites and waste management systems, and both Bulgaria and Slovakia are facing lawful action from the European Commission over their faults (Stracansky, 2010).

The administration of waste is a chief social, environmental and financial issue, which crosses all areas of public, private sectors, and impacts on the daily actions of households and people. Having insinuations for environmental defense, resource protection, and the management of carbon emissions, waste has become a major area of public policy, an industrial sector and a focus of a growing area of multi-disciplinary academic research. In recent years waste has started to come into view as an overt topic for study. Waste and its management touch on matters of sustainable growth, authority, utilization, and environmental guard (Deutz and Frostick, 2009).

Given that waste is by definition something that is discarded; achieving specific results for its management depends on social standards backed up by a widespread body of regulations and statutory tasks. In the UK original interest in waste management was from the viewpoint of public health; apprehension for environmental defense followed, with succeeding interest in resource maintenance and most lately the carbon emissions insinuations. Over the same duration, awareness and understanding of the science fundamental waste processes and their management have very much augmented, as has the assortment of technological alternatives for processing and discarding (Deutz and Frostick, 2009).

One technique that is used to influence policy directives is that of lobbying. Governing the EU lobbying scene necessitates a culture of self-regulation and ethics in politics to go together with legislation. Legal regulation of lobbying activities is only one method of regulating contacts between interest representatives and decision-makers. It should not be seen in segregation and clearly not as the ideal solution. Instead, lobbying regulation should be part and parcel of a wider advance to governance, based on the doctrines of openness, transparency, participation and disclosure. Legal provisions can effortlessly be put into practice and become counterproductive if they are not coordinated by a certain level of political culture and ethics in politics. That is why self-regulation of the field is also significant and should be encouraged in parallel (Lobbying in Poland 'escapes scrutiny', says EU scholar, 2011).

Lobbying which is the attempt to pressure the result of legislation or administrative rules and regulations, is a lawful division of any democratic system, whether it is carried out by individual people or businesses, civil society associations and other interest groups, or companies working on behalf of third parties. As the European Union persists to grow and develop, the role of lobbying is also growing radically. Over the past decade, EU authority has expanded to comprise areas of customer, social, and environmental policy, and the arrival of the euro has brought about abundant economic and monetary matters within the euro zone. Studies approximate that just about eighty percent of national laws in the European Union initiate at EU level (Lobbying in the EU: An Overview, 2008).

The ensuing augmented need for information on compound subjects now offers interest groups more occasions than ever to pressure EU legislation. Unlike the United States, that has firm rules governing the actions of lobbyists and their communications with lawmakers, the EU have to date taken a less official approach. Each of the main institutions, the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Parliament, has developed its own arrangement for functioning with interest… READ MORE

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