Ebook: Municipal Waste Management in Europe: A Comparative Study in Building Regimes

Nicolas Buclet and Olivier Godard In terms of economic scale, waste management is one of the two most important environmentally oriented sectors. 1 It stands at the cross-roads in the material organization of society, resource management, changing lifestyles and consumption patterns, and ecological issues. For many years waste management has been perceived as aresources and health issue, confined mainly to dense urban areas, and not an environmental issue. In contemporary affiuent societies, however, the scale reached by waste flows, the inheritance of accumulated deposits in soils from the waste of previous generations and increasing levels of public concern about environmental proteetion and quality of life have all conspired to impose a fresh look at what waste really implies for a modern society. We are obliged to focus our attention on such questions as how the circulation of matter is at present organized by society and can be modified and controlled if economic development is to become more environmentally sustainable. This is the period we live in. Significant changes in waste management in European countries have been introduced during the last decade or so. To some extent the transition between traditional regimes mainly based on local disposal and new regimes based on a revised organisation of flows of waste matter is still in the making, involving new attitudes, new activities, new technologies and new incentives, reducing the pressure on virgin natural resources and eliminating the huge dissipation of various pollutants into the environment.

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When confronted with broadly similar problems, countries having similar economic organisation and general cultural backgrounds have chosen rather different waste management regimes. These differences extend to the institutional framework selected, the technology used, and the processes through which the regimes have been developed. How can one make sense of these differences? Beyond standard economic assumptions that choice can be explained solely in terms of the selection of the best cost-benefit ratios, the study of waste management reveals that social choice depends on the way that political processes and institutional mechanisms combine the heterogeneous rationales that co-exist in western societies. Describing change in terms of regimes, institutional parameters and policies raises the question of how change is introduced. In Europe, this also includes the context of the European single market. Should there be free mobility of waste within the EU?
The five case studies presented here reveal a panorama of national regimes contemplating different development options within their own institutional trajectories. Differences, however, can be reduced to the interplay of only a few variables, as is done in the concluding chapter.