The opportunity to end the landfilling of recoverable waste by 2024 has been missed, but postponing it until 2030 is too big a concession to the landfill lobby. The 2027 date is also achievable for cities and municipalities if meaningful action is taken.
Very little has been done at the municipal level since 2014, when a parliamentary proposal to amend the current Waste Act was adopted. Municipalities have not been economically motivated to look for solutions other than landfilling.
The state did not even attempt to increase the already ridiculous landfill fee of CZK 500 per tonne. If the annual increase of CZK 100 had started in 2015, we could have had a landfill fee of CZK 1,100/t this year and been much closer to Western European standards.
The fact that 2024 is still in the current legislation is bad, because due to the above described inactivity and administrative complexity of the permitting process (EIA process, zoning procedure, construction procedure), no one will be able to build the necessary sorting, treatment and recycling plants in the remaining less than 4 years. Therefore, proposing a return to 2024 in the spring of 2020 will indeed expose the municipal sector to impossible demands this time.
On the other hand, the year 2030 represents an overly generous concession to the landfill lobby on the part of the submitter, when at the seminar of MP Krutáková and the Rec Help initiative, it was announced to the proponents of the landfill extension that an increase in the landfill fee to CZK 1,100 as a maximum(!) is acceptable to them by 2030. So are we to dump waste in the countryside in overcrowded landfills for the next 10 years? Should we continue to ignore recycling and other waste recovery options, including energy recovery? This is a gamble on the environment and ultimately on the raw materials and energy security of the country.
Therefore, we recommend setting a realistic date for the ban on landfilling of recoverable waste components for the compromise year 2027, as this date resonated at public presentations of the Ministry of the Environment already in 2017 - 2019, when the issue of 2024 was discussed. Until two years ago, 2027 was described as achievable, as a kind of transition period for cities and municipalities.
Miloš Kužvart, Executive Director of the Czech Academy of Sciences
