Economic instruments and separate collection systems — key strategies to increase recycling
The EU has set ambitious targets to improve municipal waste management. EU Member States need effective strategies and policy instruments to achieve these targets. This briefing provides an overview of some of the main instruments used across the EU and the performance of Member States so far.
Key messages
- Landfill taxes are the most common economic instrument used across the EU to improve municipal waste management, with 22 Member States implementing these. They are often used in combination with bans on the landfilling of certain waste types. Incineration taxes are imposed by only nine Member States and are on average set at a much lower level than landfill taxes.
- Landfill and incineration tax levels vary widely between Member States. However, the effectiveness of these taxes depends not only on their level but also on how they are designed, implemented and enforced.
- Waste collection fees are increasingly being designed in a way that incentivises waste producers to reduce waste generation and sort their waste (pay-as-you-throw schemes, following the polluter-pays principle).
- The effective separate collection of bio-waste — the single largest waste component of municipal waste — is critical to achieving high recycling rates: the best performing Member States have highly convenient bio-waste collection systems in place, while the worst performing do not.
- All five of the EU Member States with the highest recycling rates — Germany, Austria, Slovenia, the Netherlands and Luxembourg — use a well-designed landfill tax or landfill ban, or a combination of these. They also provide a large share of their populations with convenient separate bio-waste collection facilities and have pay-as-you-throw schemes in place.
