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.