Belgium

Colruyt launches the first meat trays made with recycled plastic.

Belgium prohibits the sale of single-use (disposable) e-cigarettes as of 1 January 2025.

Over the last few years, global energy demand has risen, and this trend is expected to continue. Almost all European Union (EU) countries are suffering from a shortage of energy services. Annually, EU fossil fuel energy production falls; for example, in 2014, gas production fell by 11.2% compared to 2013. Energy imports, especially natural gas, have increased as a result of lower energy output. The EU is still heavily reliant on fossil fuel imports (oil and gas), and the cost of EU energy imports in 2017 increased by 26% (€266 billion).

57.4 million tons of e-waste were generated worldwide this year. This represents a new record. Despite valuable raw materials, only a small fraction is recycled.

With the new report on methane emissions, the European Parliament supports bold actions to minimise the damages methane causes to the environment. The waste sector cannot be left out of the process.

Hospital and medical wastes are disposed in tens of thousands of dedicated incinerators or are autoclaved to destroy pathogens and then landfilled. However, over a hundred cities which have waste to energy (WTE) power plants fueled by municipal solid waste, use these plants to co-combust medical wastes. This report identified forty one such plants, located in a dozen nations, which in total co-combust about 90,000 tons of medical waste annually. The medical waste represented an average of 2.4% of the total amount of wastes combusted in these WTE power plants. Generally, the medical wastes are collected at the point of origin in puncture resistant, leakproof and sealed containers which are transported to WTE plants and are mechanically conveyed to the WTE furnace.

As reflected in the proposals included in the “Fit for 55” climate package, sustainable waste management may contribute to the European goals of emissions reduction. Waste-to-Energy has an instrumental role in the treatment of non-recyclable waste.

Bulgaria: Disposal of the most dangerous locations with buried pesticides

This Outlook can help decision-makers understand the direction in which we are heading and help to assess which policies can support a more circular economy. The OECD stands ready to assist governments in making this transition by designing, developing and delivering better resource efficiency policies for better lives.

A report by Ecologic Institute and Climact shows that the draft National Energy and Climate Plans presented by governments at the start of 2019 are in acute need of improvement. They suffer from inadequate targets and insufficient details on the policies and financing needed to move towards net-zero emission economies in Europe. Member States also need to do better in involving their national stakeholders in providing input to the plans, to benefit from their expertise and to get them on board for future policies. Good practice examples exist around the EU to serve as inspiration for the final plans due by the end of the year.

An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team of experts found that Belgium demonstrates commitment to the safe management of its radioactive waste and spent fuel, while also noting opportunities to enhance the national policies and arrangements for eventual disposal.

18 Member States are at risk of missing one or both of the 2025 targets.

The 2018 bi-Annual EEC/WTERT conference was held this year at The City College of New York hosted by The Earth Engineering Center at City College (EEC|CCNY). The conference brought together the best minds in academia, industry, and government representing 12 countries across five continents to discuss important current topics in waste.

In general terms, landfill mining (LFM) and enhanced landfill mining (ELFM) aim for the mitigation of the pollution originating from landfill sites, reduction of aftercare and closure costs, land reclaim in urban areas, material recovery and, among many others, regaining landfill capacity.

In Belgium the municipalities are responsible for the household waste. Before 1970 each municipality in Belgium had a dumping place. All the waste from households and industries was dumped there, giving lots of environmental pollution and annoyance. Especially in the densily populated parts of the country it became practically impossible to find locations for such new dumping places, because they were no more socially accepted. Around 1970 municipalities started to cooperate in intermunicipalities to find a solution for their waste problem.

The European environmental initiative on raw materials has recently promoted the efforts in recycling and recovery of metal alloys. Extraction of purified higher-value alloy streams from non-ferrous metal waste turned out to be a challenging task due to the diversity of alloys and the resemblance in their physical properties. Hyperspectral imaging in the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) has nevertheless proven to be an efficient technique to identify aluminum, zinc, copper, brass alloys and stainless steel (e.g., Barnabé et al., 2015, Kutila et al., 2005).

New book on modern WTE technology and some of its applications around the world by Dr. Efstatios Kalogirou, member of the Global WtERT Council and co-founder of WtERT-Greece. It discusses thermal treatment technologies, including combustion, novel gasification, plasma gasification, and pyrolysis. Furthermore it offers 35 real-world international case studies from the Americas, Asia, Europe, as well as Africa and provides different approaches for different geographic areas.

In waste to energy (WtE) plants the boiler is a critical component: it is the component most subjected to ash fouling and corrosion phenomena, it may have long shut downs in case of extraordinary interventions and it requires notified body inspections of the pressure parts.

One of the latest innovations in Mechanical Biological Treatment-plants is a new process, called SORDISEP (SORting, DIgestion & SEParation).

This Study to assess the implementation by EU Member States of certain provisions of Directive 1999/31/EC on the landfill of waste, carried out for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Environment (DG Environment), investigates the situation in the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU) as regards the landfilling of untreated non-hazardous municipal solid waste.

Waste-to-Energy plants are an integral part of modern municipal Waste Management Systems. Today recycling and energy recovery from waste are the only methods of dealing with municipal waste. This is demonstrated by Waste Management Systems in countries such as Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Austria, where the municipal waste management is limited solely to recycling and energy recovery from waste. The currently discussed concept of the latest circular economy package can hardly change anything in this matter. Poland, as one of the leaders among the new EU member states (since 2004), has still a lot to do within the scope of recycling and waste-to-energy.

Refractory products are a vital element in all high-temperature processes. The re-use of refractory material has a high potential to reduce waste production and primary raw material consumption.

High value recycling of refractories into the production of new refractories is currently limited due to a shortage of high purity raw materials.

The DRANCO technology was developed in the eighties as one of the very first anaerobic digestion technologies for municipal solid waste (MSW). A first demonstration plant was erected in 1984 in Ghent, Belgium. At present about thirty DRANCO installations are constructed in about fifteen different countries. This paper describes these DRANCO installations treating the organic fraction of MSW, integrated in a mechanicalbiological treatment plant (MBT). It does not describe DRANCO installations dealing with source separated biowaste.

Although peat is a major component of potting soil, its use is questioned due to ecological constraints. In addition, there is a need for better valorization of green waste compost in Belgium and an increasing consumer awareness of sustainable garden products. Therefore, experiments were set up to develop a sustainable high-quality all-purpose potting soil for the consumer market.

Belgium has a coastline of 65 km and a territorial sea and continental shelf of 3 600 km,2 thus making it the smallest maritime area in North-West Europe. The Belgian marine environment is intensively used by different actors, competing with each other for limited space. Activities include recreation and tourism, shipping, fisheries, dredging, military activities, laying of cables and pipelines and mineral extraction.