International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

59
which was designed to reflect a defined proportion – of the order 50% - of the
total costs of service provision;
2. In the absence of funds coming from either central or local taxation, it
becomes important to have in place some counterpart law which requires
households to avail themselves of the collection service provided. In essence,
this mimics the Danish approach, in which households are required to pay,
first and foremost, for waste collection services. In the absence of such a
measure, which is probably necessary under 1, above, also, tenderers could
not be sure that households would take-up the service they were offering (so
that tenders would include an upward adjustment to account for the risk of
non-use by residents); and
3. In either case, and so as to reduce the costs of waste management at the
point of delivery, the costs of operating separate collection schemes and for
recycling material should be met, as far as possible, in their entirety by
obligated producers. In addition, recognising that there remain pecuniary
externalities upon collectors related to the unrecycled proportion of the waste
targeted under producer responsibility, and recognising also the desirability of
recycling, the targets for recycling of the targeted materials should be suitably
ambitious, and there should be sanctions applied in the event of failure to
meet these targets. The European Commission’s proposal for a revised
Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment suggests that where
appropriate, Member States should encourage producers to finance all the
cost occurring for collection facilities for WEEE from private households. This is
in line with the polluter pays principle. The implication of this proposal is that
a) producer responsibility measures need to be re-visited to ensure that all
relevant costs fall fully upon producers; and b) the targets which producers are
required to meet are suitably ambitious.
Either 2) or more palatably, a combination of 2) and one, or both, of 1) and 3), would
be necessary to ensure that households do not simply opt out of the service, with
potentially detrimental impacts for the value for money gained from tenders for
service provision. It should be noted that both of these approaches also enhance the
prospects for setting a more uniform charging structure for household service
provision at an average level. By this, we do not mean setting one type of charging
system, rather that the charges should follow a specific structure to maintain revenue
stability.
3.6.3 Treatment Facilities
Whatever body takes charge for tendering collection, that body effectively has the
ability to control the waste once it has been collected (for example, it can specify the
delivery of different wastes to specified destinations). This makes it possible for the
body controlling that waste to tender for treatments appropriate to the way in which
the material is collected. This would give security of supply of the material to suppliers
of treatment capacity.
In the majority of jurisdictions outside Ireland, the developer of a given waste
treatment facility for dealing with household waste (municipal waste is more broadly
defined in Ireland than in other EU Member States) is typically given a high level of
International Review of Waste Policy: Annexes