Sustainable waste management through end-of-waste criteria development

The Waste Framework Directive 2000/98 (WFD) contains specific requirements to define end-of-waste criteria (EWC). The main goal of EWC is to remove and eliminate the administrative loads of waste legislation for safe and high-quality waste materials, thereby facilitating and assisting recycling. The target is to produce effective with high quality of recyclables materials, promoting product standardization and quality and safety assurance, and improving harmonization and legal certainty in the recyclable material markets. At the same time, those objectives aim to develop a plan in order to improve the development and wider use of environmental technologies, which reduce pressure on environment and at the same time address the three dimensions of the Lisbon strategy: growth, jobs and environment. This paper presents the importance of EWC, and the approach of setting EWC as EWC affect several management systems as well as sustainable and clean technologies.