ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Waste management, in environmental engineering, covers all policies, procedures or methodologies aimed at managing the entire waste process, from their production to their final destination, thus engaging the phase of collection, transport, treatment (uncleaning or recycling) until the reuse of waste materials, usually produced by human activity, in an attempt to reduce their effects on human health and impact on the natural environment.

A particular interest in recent decades concerns the reduction of the effects of waste on nature and the environment thanks to the possibility of saving and recovering natural resources from them and reducing the production of waste themselves through the optimization of their management cycle.

Description

National waste management programme
Proper management of waste is fundamental both from the political and economic point of view and from the environmental point of view, as it implies the protection of constitutionally protected goods such as the right to health (Article 32 Cost) and the protection of the environment (Article 9 Cost). As a result of the transposition of the European Union Directives on environmental matters, the numerous changes made to the waste management system resulted in the need for a radical reorganization of state and territorial competences, including the allocation to the Regions of the function of identifying, on the basis of objective environmental criteria, areas not suitable for the localization of disposal and recovery plants. Moreover, the need to define national criteria and strategic lines has also been felt.

In this regard, in implementation of the EU Directives 2018/851 and 2018/852, the new Legislative Decree. n. 116 of 3 September 2020, art. 198-bis, established the National Programme for Waste Management, curated by the Ministry of the Environment and with the technical support of the ISPRA (Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research). The purpose of this Programme is to define strategies, criteria and objectives to which regions and provinces must comply with the drafting of regional waste management plans, which must be consistent with the national one. The latter will then be subjected to VAS (Strategic Environmental Assessment), in perfect consistency with what is set up by the CGUE (C 305-2018) .

Recycling objectives
Legislative Decree 116/2020 is clear in defining the rules for calculating the recycling objectives. In particular, the legislation provides that the weight of recycled urban waste is calculated as the weight of waste which, after being subjected to the various control operations aimed at guaranteeing a high quality recycling, are started at the actual recycling stage, during which these wastes are treated in order to obtain new products, materials or substances. In a nutshell, as a general rule, the weight of