June 12 (SeeNews) - The European Commission urged Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Romania to tackle deficiencies in their respective approaches to waste management so as to increase recycling and avoid missing the 2025 targets concerning municipal and overall packaging waste as set out in EU regulations.
The Commission found that 18 member states in total run the risk of missing one or both of the 2025 targets, while the four EU member states from Southeast Europe (SEE), along with Cyprus, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, Poland and Slovakia, are at risk of missing both, the EU executive said in an early warning report on Friday.
Some countries also continue to dispose of most of their municipal waste in landfills and will likely be unable to meet the 2035 landfilling target as well, the Commission said before providing state-of-play reports and individual recommendations to each country.
"These recommendations cover a broad range of actions: reducing non-recyclable waste, increasing reuse, boosting separate collection, developing waste treatment capacities for sorting and recycling, improving governance, deploying economic instruments and awareness-raising," the Commission noted.
Slovenia was the sole EU member from SEE that the Commission pointed to as being on track to meet the 2025 targets. The other countries deemed to be coping well with recycling were Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
EU directives on waste management stipulate that member states should recycle 55% of municipal waste, with as much as that to be prepared for reuse, and 65% of total packaging waste. Specific targets have been set for waste recycling depending on materials, such as 75% for paper and cardboard, 70% for glass and 50% for plastic.
The EU rules also aim to reduce the landfilling of municipal waste to less than 10% by 2035. In Bulgaria, for instance, the rate of municipal use of landfill sites was 61% in 2020, data from the country assessment showed.