An alliance made up of 26 civil society entities has decided to change its strategy to respond to insufficient waste management in Spain. They have denounced the kingdom of Spain before the European Commission for non-compliance with the community objective of reuse and recycling of 50% by 2020.
Official data confirms what several of these organizations already advanced a couple of years ago: in Spain 40.5% of municipal waste was recycled in 2020, while European (2008) and Spanish legislation (2011 Waste Law ) forced this figure to be 50%.
“We are facing very serious breaches. 2.8 million tons of waste have been taken directly to the landfill without prior treatment: 12.7%. There are no relevant changes in waste management. Let’s hope the new state law works. But it is easy to think that the European objectives for 2025 will not be met,” says Carlos Arribas, an expert at Ecologistas en Acción.
This group of 26 entities has decided to take the Spanish state to Brussels to request the protection of the EC and to reverse this situation. “We have spent years denouncing non-compliance, very low recycling rates in quality and quantity, a null presence of prevention and reuse policies, late transpositions of directives and laws that are not complied with”, summarize the spokespersons for the entities. “The management of waste in Spain does not work”, they claim.
The data from the official report of the Ministry of Ecological Transition is clear: in 2020 only 40.5% of municipal waste was recycled. And the forecasts of the entities is that, if nothing changes, they will continue to fail to meet the objectives in 2025 (55%) and 2030 (60%). “In fact, things are getting worse. The advance of Eurostat places the recycling ratio in Spain for 2021 at 36.7%, so the data for 2020 is not that it improves, but rather that it goes down.
In addition, very soon biostabilized waste will no longer be counted as recycled, “so the reality is that only a quarter of the waste (24.3%) is recycled,” explained Carlos Arribas, responsible for waste at Ecologistas in Action “And the community of Madrid is especially non-compliant, since it only recycles 28.6%,” he adds.
Organizations from different fields are added to the list of signatories to the complaint, such as the main environmental NGOs in the state or organizations from different territories such as the Balearic Islands, Navarra, Euskadi, Catalonia, the Canary Islands or Galicia, where the social, environmental and economics of this non-compliance.
“This is our reality: filled landfills, contaminated natural environments and the health of people at risk,” said Miquel Roset, director of Retorna.
For her part, Eva Saldaña, director of Greenpeace, has focused on the fact that the complaint is a “call for help” in the face of a situation that has been “stagnant” for years and that, rather than improving, is getting worse.
In fact, Saldaña has revealed that, even before the royal decree on packaging was approved on December 27, “the PP presented a bill that is being discussed in Parliament and that calls for lowering the objectives of prevention, reuse and recycling for being too ambitious. We cannot trust that the Waste Law and the rest of the regulations will be complied with in the face of this tactic of hindering any small advance”, criticized the director of Greenpeace.
Saldaña considered the manufacturers’ campaigns against the tax on single-use plastics unjustified; for example, a PET bottle is taxed with only one cent of euros. “Enough of image laundering. If the State gives in, we will continue failing to meet the European objectives,” he added.
Other spokespersons criticized the low levels of packaging recycling, since a significant volume is not deposited in the yellow container.
The complainant entities have asked the Spanish State for commitments and real solutions, which according to the coordinator of Friends of the Earth, Blanca Ruibal, involve “putting an end to the dumping of untreated materials, implementing the separate collection of organic matter permanently, regulate flows that do not even have an extended producer responsibility system and deploy, monitor and comply with reuse measures, among other measures”.
And Ruibal herself has announced: “we are going to continue denouncing the Spanish State as many times as necessary until this situation changes, because the reduction of waste is key to the development of the sustainable development objectives and the 2030 Agenda and they are intrinsically linked to the climate emergency”.
