A Review of waste management legislations in the UK (EU).

Please read carefully

The European Waste Catalogue (EWC) contains a hierarchical list of waste descriptions, each of which is assigned a numeric code. The Waste Management Licensing Regulations 1994 contain a list of substances and objects that are legally considered to be waste.

Waste management in the UK is controlled by legislation that is driven by and transposes European Directives and Regulations. The UK national controls on waste originated from the Control of Pollution Act 1974 and were strengthened by the introduction of the Environmental Protection Act 1990.

Operational legislation covers the disposal, storage, treatment, recycling and transport of waste. Administration legislation controls storage, registration, licensing, monitoring and record keeping.

This project is about identifying, reviewing and compiling all the major laws and legislations in the United Kingdom that are associated with waste management. Which will consider how the laws have impacted and influenced waste management in the UK, what was the perception from the general to these laws? The factors that were pushing waste management were the environmental factors, the ozone layer, climate change and the greenhouse effect but the sole reason it is done in the UK is the legislation, the law is very important because it is pushing the people to manage waste efficiently. If there were no laws, managing waste would not be done, as it should be.

This topic is worth researching, as it will give us an insight on how the laws and legislations helped influence waste management in the United Kingdom positively or negatively since they first were implemented. It will help us acknowledge if there should be more or less laws, should they be implemented more firmly or tenderly. This research will help us find out if there should be more work done with legislations. Also this project will try to include all the major laws since the very first law ever implemented in the UK up to date. This study is a very challenging project, as it needs a lot of researching and digging around to gather all the laws up to date.

Overall aim and Objectives

The aim of this study is to see how the laws and legislations have affected the United Kingdom in relation with waste management since they were first introduced, till up to date. Have the laws made a positive or negative impact? Have they really changed the way waste management is implemented in the UK? It is intended that the research findings will contribute in helping develop the legislation system in the European Union seeing as the major waste management laws come from Europe (EU legislations) and how to better evolve the laws in the future considering that this study will go into a critical review of the influence the legislations have brought upon the UK whether its good or bad, soft or strict, efficient or not so efficient, enough laws or not as many as there should be etc.

These above aims raise the following core objectives:

To Search and identify all the waste management laws since the beginning of there introduction in the UK
To Evaluate all the major laws in terms of waste
To synthesize the laws targets and briefly talk about each

After the extraction of all the information needed from the Internet has been completed and the laws have been identified and reviewed in terms of waste, the findings will be discussed on how the laws overall could be better established or better implemented furthermore to what missing laws could be introduced from the findings concluded.

The End target of this study is to publish a journal paper in an engineering law related journal.

Resources

For the purpose of this study search terms such as “Waste management AND Legislation AND EU legislation.” Are used for searching the following database, websites, publications and journals; Department For Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), The Environment Agency (EA), Welsh Assembly Government (WAG), Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP), EUROSTAT, European Commission (EC), European Federation Of Waste Management (FEAD),

Municipal Waste Europe (MWE), Zero Waste EUROPE, The Environmental Service Association (ESA), Air and Waste Managment Association (A&WMA), Journal of Planning and Environmental Law (JPEL) and any other sources that may be useful and can contribute to this study. The mentioned sources above have been chosen, as they are the main source of search engines that provide precise and reliable information and data as well as the most up to date ones.

Method

The Proposed aim of this study will be in a form of a desktop research (Secondary research) as it will allow this study to evaluate and review all the legislations and laws that are associated with waste management from governmental data bases and previous studies in the European union. Which means undertaking a lot of digging around and a lot of research and reading in many databases to obtain all the necessary information. Each law will be evaluated in terms of waste, when has the law come into act? Has it been amended? What is it essentially? So each law will have a section on its own reviewing it in a page or two. There will be a timeline and all the laws compiled together from the first to the last up to date. After finding all the laws that are related to waste management and there influence, Further expansion can be made by looking at background information that have different descriptive analysis available on data bases such as Science direct; engineering village, pubmed.com, lexis and westlaw.com which can help with the input and use of different studies carried out around the same topic for this study. As previously outlined the collection of data will be from the first law introduced in the United Kingdom up to this very moment.