The Ministry of the Environment has published its intention to prepare a law by the end of 2023 that will guarantee the fulfilment of European targets for packaging waste management (PPWR) on behalf of the state, not individual companies or municipalities. It will probably come into force in 2025.
This is a very complex task, where the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic will define the competences of the operator of the mandatory backup system, define the basic parameters of the collection network, the amount of backups, and what will happen to unreturned backups. All of this is happening in the current situation of uncontrolled inflation, high prices of energy and material inputs, and rising prices of the basic necessities of life.
This issue does not offer simple, generally accepted solutions. Translating the costs of the system into prices for end consumers is still an issue. What is already clear, however, is that we are entering the current most efficient European national system of separate waste collection in the Czech Republic with a fundamental change that could threaten this decades-old system.
And it is the European dimension of the problem of whether or not to have mandatory backups that is key. According to the current work plan of the European Parliament, the plenary should vote on the amendments to the PPWR in October this year, and there are already figures that we can manage in the Czech Republic WITHOUT mandatory backup.
In fact, in the EP amendments to the PPWR, there were also proposals to reduce the limit for the introduction of mandatory backup from 90% of collection to 85% of collection. If the Czech Republic met this (we currently have around 82%), then the current challenging economic situation in the Czech Republic would not need to be burdened with the costs of introducing mandatory backup. It will be advisable to wait to see what the final approved PPWR looks like. Further fundamental changes may be due to the revision of the Waste Directive currently underway (also at European level), which should be presented to the EC around the beginning of autumn.
But let's also keep in mind developments beyond the "borders of Europe" - a report published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advance, which clearly describes the additional risks of plastics recycling due to leakage of microplastics into the environment. What it is about:
Researchers from Scotland and Canada collected and tested water samples at the recycling plant.
They found that the water used to clean the plastics was full of toxic microplastics after use. When a plastic bottle is washed, the next step in the recycling process is to crush it and melt it into pellets, which are then transformed into new plastic. The problem is that this process produces a lot of microplastics that persist in the water and run off into the local sewage treatment plant.
Many wastewater treatment plants are not equipped to filter out microplastics, all this hidden microscopic waste ends up contaminating the environment.
