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3.2 The Roots of Dutch Circular Economy Policies
Even though the term ‘circular economy’ had not yet been coined
at the time, the first Dutch circular initiatives date back to the
late 1970s. 16 In 1979, the Dutch government introduced into its
environmental policy the waste hierarchy of ‘reduce, reuse,
recycling, energy recovery, incineration and landfill’. 17 Albeit with a
few exceptions, landfilling soon became prohibited. Landfilling in
a country as small and muddy as the Netherlands caused serious
soil pollution, and the clean-up turned out to be very expensive,
particularly when new neighbourhoods were built on top of the
landfills. The Dutch government therefore decided to shift in the
early 1980s from landfilling to incineration and recycling. The mid-
1980s brought the establishment of new waste incineration plants
and recycling activities. Strategies for 30 resource streams, such
as tyres, batteries and packaging, were formulated and executed
according to the waste hierarchy. For some resource streams (e.g.
paper, packaging, electronics and cars), an EPR was introduced
from the 1990s onwards.
In 1989 the first National Environmental Policy Plan was launched.
Its central mobilising concept was ‘integrated chain management’,
an approach for the reduction of environmental impacts of
product chains from the extraction-, production- and use phases
till the waste phase. In fact, its main principles were comparable
with what we now call circular economy. As a follow-up the Dutch
government introduced an environmental product policy in the
early 1990s. This policy encouraged companies to design products
more sustainably. Coined as ‘ecodesign’, this approach accounted
for a product’s potentially negative environmental impacts over its
whole life cycle.
16 Cramer, J., Milieu (Environment), Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2014.
17 Lansink, J., Challenging Changes; Connecting Waste Hierarchy and
Circular Economy, Nijmegen: LEA, 2017.