International

“Waste is a growing problem within Europe and beyond. We are in danger of slowly drowning in our own waste. It is therefore high time to take serious action before it literally goes over our heads.” Kartika Liotard, SP Euro-MP and a member of the European Parliament's Committee on the Environment and Public Health, spoke in today’s parliamentary debate on the problem of waste.

“It is important to recall that waste has now become a product to be traded, which has also had negative consequences. Physical controls suggest that a third of these extremely lucrative transports of waste are illegal. A new and more stringent policy is therefore urgently needed, but we must make sure we are introducing the right methods.”

Not all of the measures that the European Union intends to take are, in Kartika Liotard's view, likely to represent effective means to tackle the problem. “Limiting the amount of waste, reuse and recycling, these are good, sustainable policy directions. But large-scale introduction of incinerators such as proposed by the Rapporteur, the British Conservative Caroline Jackson, is absolutely the wrong way to go, from either the point of view of climate change or that of conservation of our natural resources. A good waste policy must solve problems, and certainly not create new ones.”