engleski

Analysis of Deposit-based Packaging Waste management system in Croatia

In industrialized countries rejected waste packaging participates in domestic municipal waste with a high share. In the European Union of an average 500 kg/cap of municipal waste, 140 kg/cap is packaging waste. The EU specific targets for packaging waste and its recycling and recovery are defined as minimum 55% rate for recycling that will be raised to 75% by 2030. Croatia is lagging behind other EU/EEA countries with a 52.7% of a recycled packaging waste. A large quantities of packaging waste are still deposited at landfills in Croatia. The packaging waste management through the deposit system is one of the ways to ensure sufficient quantities of these materials for the production of fully recycled packaging. Deposit systems have proven themselves with large amounts of collected and recovered waste packaging with a small amount of impurities within the collected material (which is a prerequisite for high-efficiency recycling in the closed loop system). Deposit systems in Europe regularly achieve collection rates of 80-95% while systems without deposits achieve collection rates of 40% on average. Today, around 40 countries and regions in the world have implemented it. This paper offers deeper insight into functioning and sustainability (environmental and economic) of the deposit-based packaging waste management system in Croatia. In the paper, a detailed analysis of the deposit based waste management system for waste beverage packaging was made. Also, a comparison of waste beverage packaging management systems with five best performing EU and EEA countries was done. It was found that Croatian deposit system lags behind similar systems in other European countries. For this reason, a SWOT analysis was conducted and weak spots identified. Based on that, recommendations and measures to improve the system have been defined aimed at identifying the payers in the deposit system, system controlling and monitoring (including strong digitalization), improvement of transparency and reporting channels throughout the system, and improvement of the system efficiency. Only then such system could reach its full potential and thus reduce the system costs for all stakeholders while simultaneously increasing the environmental benefits. The work done so far is just a first stage of the research that will also include an LCA- based analysis as well as the detailed economic analysis with the final aim of determining the sustainability and a ”real” cost of the deposit-refund system (per recovered container).

packaging waste management ; deposit-based system

nije evidentirano