Communal waste management market in Poland 2007 - our report
 
The polish waste management market is in development from 10 years. What are the results?

Waste storage

Today, as much as 97% of municipal waste in Poland is stored in landfills without any pre-sorting. Although EU legislation is in force in Poland, this is still the most popular way of waste disposal. There is a lack of system approach in waste management, as well as a lack of waster recovery and recycling installations. At present, the issues of standards of conduct and manners of providing services are confined to small, local backyards. Decisions about who transports waste are taken locally, which causes that the KPGO (National Waste Management Plan) reference document is in force only on paper -decision-making competencies are defined imprecisely and they are divided between a province, a district and a commune, i.e. between different administrative levels. There is no system approach. It should be added here that municipal waste in Poland is not owned by communes, and is only subject to the right of free competition. Today, only in the urban agglomeration of Warszawa, there operate 80 companies, which have obtained a permit for waste disposal, i.e. for waste collection from residents, and this result in very low standards of provided services. 
In Poland there are no municipal waste incineration plant - public consultations concerning location of 8 incineration plants in major Polish cities have been conducted only for several months. Such installations could be financed from structural funds, but they encounter strong opposition from residents and ecological organizations.

In Appendix to "National Waste Management Plan to 2010" (KPGO) - adopted by RESOLUTION OF THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS No 233 dated 29 December 2006 (Journal of Laws: Mon. Pol. No 90 item 946), there is a list of authorized landfills for waste other than hazardous or inert waste, on which municipal waste is stored. According to the state as of 31 December 2005, this list includes 764 authorized municipal landfills: as of 16.10.2007, all these landfills should have an integrated permit according to IPPC directive (it is obligatory for all waste facilities in use, except for inert waste facilities, with a reception capacity of over 10 tons of waste per 24 hours, or with a total volume of over 25 000 tons). From the information obtained in January this year from the Environmental Impact Assessment Department at the Polish Ministry of Environment, which issues integrated permits, it appears that out of approx. 500 facilities that should apply for a permit, only 260 entities submitted applications, and roughly 200 obtained the license (i.e. integrated permit). 200. This means that, as of today, less than 30% of waste storage facilities in Poland meet European standards. We don't know their volumes and methods of operation. We know that only half of them have scales for weighing the incoming waste. But we know prices of waste storage: by the end of 2007, the price of storage of unsorted municipal waste in the facilities built mainly from EU funds (for example, ISPA) had been PLN 100-150/ton, i.e. EUR 25-30. Currently, this price has been raised by law by 500%, but nothing was done to tighten the waste transport and storage system and built the selection system. Ten years of functioning of this system resulted in numerous pathologies and also caused that dirty, mixed municipal waste disappears in black economy - probably this concerns the amounts of approx. 2 million tons a year. Nobody bothers about selective waste collection.
Basic irregularities in waste storage in Poland are caused, first of all, by a lack of clear definition of waste storage and recovery.
Stored waste is defined in the D5 process (storage - Appendix 6 to the Waste Act) but, as we know, so-called interlayers are used for proper operation of a facility, which means the R14 process (recovery - Appendix 5).
Probably the translation of Council Directive 199/31/EC on the Landfill of Waste was incorrect. This concerns the words "disposal", "storage" and "acceptance". De facto, in Poland, the facilities called landfills conduct waste management in two different ways (they store waste only informally and in practice they recover "inert waste"). There are no criteria for admission of waste separately to storage and recovery on a landfill, although each landfill must accept, apart from waste typical for storage, also inert waste. Inert waste is used to form so-called inert interlayer, which covers stored waste in order to prevent emission of dust and odors, and dispersion of fine fractions. Usually, 0.1 to 0.2 m of an inert layer falls to 1-meter layer (on some landfills - 2 m) of stored waste. 
A lot of landfills are rather recovery facilities, i.e. the proportion of the amount of stored waste to inert waste is inversed. Operators argue with officials in order to make them allow, in issued decisions, a 2-meter interlayer at e.g. 0.5-meter layer of stored waste, as it is not prohibited by law. The "ecological tax" is not paid for the waste recognized as interlayers. Consequently - such waste is cheaper at the "gate" to a facility. 
The regulation of the Minister of Environment, which, in accordance with the Polish law, allows using waste for filling unfavourably transformed lands (such as cave-ins, open pits that are not mined, or worked out parts of open pits), as well as for hardening surfaces of land, has been in force since last year. At present, Poland has probably the highest potential of waste storage in Europe, however, it is a pity that it so far from the European standards.

Recovery and recycling of packaging waste in Poland

In Poland, recovery and recycling cover packaging waste, car wrecks and, from January 2008, also electric and electronic equipment. We have no data concerning the two latter ones. The EU directive has been transposed to the Polish law in the scope of the obligation of recovery and recycling of used packaging, however, also in this market, many irregularities occur - first of all, as it has been mentioned above, there is no selective waste collection system, or it is at an insufficient level. Whereas, there operate about 30 recovery organizations, which execute the obligations, imposed by the European Commission, to recover 60% and to recycle 25% of the packaging introduced to the market, mainly in supermarket chains and wholesale stores, by purchasing bulk packaging. Recovery and recycling according to the European law is now impossible. Placement of containers for selective waste collection on streets is the responsibility of waste collection companies, however, considering the price of waste disposal of PLN 100-150/ton, they were not interested in it. In 2004, 3 million tons of packaging introduced to the market was recorded. This amount of packaging was declared by the entrepreneurs, who revealed themselves in the system, that is - came to a recovery organization and openly declared a specific amount of packaging introduced to the market. A part of entrepreneurs has been covered by the obligation of recovery and recycling by law. 

Probably, 20% of the market is outside any records. If the last public data of the Ministry of Environment of 2004 on the waste market, which concern mixed waste, are correct, then among 11.8 million tons of mixed waste (reported by the Ministry of Environment for waste generated in households), there should be 40% of packaging, i.e. approximately 4 million tons of metal, glass, plastics and paper. Whereas, entrepreneurs declared only 3 million tons, which indicates an error in calculations. This problem concerns probably the whole SME sector, where companies are not covered by the recording obligation, because they introduce amounts of packaging below the lower limit for recording, or declare an amount smaller than actual one in order to avoid penalties, or do not report to a recovery organization at all. This problem also concerns the companies that report to unreliable organizations, which, instead of performing waste recovery or recycling, issue fake documents confirming execution of the recycling obligation in order to allow entrepreneurs to avoid payment of the product fee, i.e. a penalty for a failure to fulfil the recycling obligation, paid to the State Budget. In this situation, it is difficult to indicate the most popular recycling technologies. There in no register of recyclers (a list of companies participating in a given market) in Poland - only recovery organizations have the data about them and their technologies. In the face of a lack of infrastructure for selective waste collection at the source (i.e. as close to a resident as possible), last year the price for selection of the most expensive plastic, i.e. white PET, in the most modern Polish sorting plants (built for the money from ISPA) was approx. PLN 1600/t (EUR 400), whereas recyclers purchased the same ton of the product for PLN 800 (EUR 200). A subsidy received by a sorting plant from a recovery organization amounted to PLN 50 (EUR 12). That is because the fact that there are many documents circulating in the market, which confirm fictitious recycling instead of the actual one, and they simply spoil the market.