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EU Regulation on Waste Statistics
In December 2002, the EU Regulation on waste statistics was published in the Official Journal of the European Communities. The Regulation requires Member States to provide the Commission with information on the generation, recovery and disposal of waste.
Background
Regulation (EC) No 2150/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2002 on waste statistics was adopted in November 2002 and published in the Official Journal of the European Communities in December 2002.
The objective of this Regulation is to establish a framework for the production of European Union-wide statistics on the generation, recovery and disposal of waste. This legislation should create the basis for monitoring the implementation of waste policy and compliance with the principles of European Union waste legislation with the aim of maximising recovery and safe disposal.
Furthermore, as a statistical instrument it will provide information against which the principle of waste prevention can be measured and to establish the link between waste generation data and global, national and regional inventories of resource use.
The Regulation
Member States will be required to produce statistics on the generation, recovery and disposal of waste, excluding radioactive waste, which is already covered by other legislation. The statistics will cover the generation of waste according to Annex I of the Regulation, which lists the categories of waste to be included, and the amounts subject to the recovery and disposal operations summarised in Annex II.
The first year for which statistics will be collected is 2004. Member States will then have to provide data every second year after 2004, i.e. 2006, 2008 etc… The data will be submitted to EUROSTAT and the Commission is required to submit a report to the European Parliament in December 2007, and every three years thereafter.
Within the next three years, the Commission will also fund and carry out pilot studies on the import and export of waste carried out by Member States. The aim of the studies will be to develop a methodology to obtain regular data on waste imports and exports.
Definition of recycling
Encouragingly, the Regulation contains a clear definition of recycling, which is consistent with that contained in Article 3 of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (94/62/EC) and the draft European Standard, prEN 13965-2 currently being considered by CEN:
'recycling` shall mean the reprocessing in a production process of the waste materials for the original purpose or for other purposes including organic recycling but excluding energy recovery;
This is consistent with ESA's position that recycling should be measured on an output basis.
January 2003 
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