The Baltic countries towards the goals of waste framework directive

Abstract

Social acceptance of littering behaviour has changed in the recent decades, with rapidly increasing public awareness about the human health and biodiversity impacts that can result from waste-mismanagement. Littering has an important impact on landscape and overall environment. It is of vital importance to assess existing littering sources and to try to limit them at their source. During recent years European Union (EU) has significantly strengthened the waste management requirements. In terms of newer Member States it meant – inventory of the existing system, closure and recultivation of the sub-standard landfills, development of new infrastructure, using best available technologies and, of course implementation and development of separate waste collection system. In order to ensure higher quality recycling, requirements to sorted waste collection become higher. The authors see one of the solutions – implementation of the deposit refund system (DRS), especially taking into account that both plastic beverage bottles as well as bottle caps have been identified within top 10 single use plastic found in the marine litter. The research is based on the benchmarking and statistical data analysis. As the result of the research, the authors propose implementation of DRS as a solution both to Latvian waste management issues and as a tool to improve landscape from the environmental aspects.

Trends of Municipal Waste Flows, Composition, Treatment in Lithuania and Its Regions

“…The importance of circular economy is growing nowadays and receives increased interest from citizens, companies, governments and policy makers (Corona et al, 2019;Cudečka-Puriņa et al, 2019;Haupt et al, 2019;Kirchherr et al, 2017;Lahti et al, 2018;Schroeder et al, 2019). Circular economy aims to foster responsible and circular use of resources (Moraga et al, 2019;Wilson, 2015), its principles can be compared to the processes happening in our nature, where the end of one process lays the groundwork for a new process (Allam, 2018;Hannon & Zaman, 2018).…”

Impact of the Implementation of the Deposit Refund System on Coastal Littering in Latvia

“…In addition to boosting beverage container recycling rates, a significant advantage of DRSunattainable without its implementation-is a reduction in litter [3,6,7]. Littering has a significant negative impact on the environment and wildlife [8,9] as well as causes negative costs to people and the economy [10,11].…”