Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-01-18-Speech-2-649-000"
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"en.20110118.23.2-649-000"2
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"Madam President, I should like to thank the Members very much for all their views.
The last thing which I would like to mention is the honourable Member who said that we should be more careful about waste management problems elsewhere in the European Union. In the infringement cases by sector in 2009, waste accounts for 19%, water 20%, nature 19%, air 16%, and the rest less. We are looking horizontally at all implementation problems and we are bound to do that. I can assure you that we will do it also in the future.
To conclude, we should truly do our best, you as Members of Parliament and I as Commissioner for the Environment, to spread across Europe the message of waste as an opportunity for the future. We desperately need that message in the context of the limited resources which we are increasingly facing from day to day. Resource efficiency is the name of the problem and resource efficiency is at the core of our future competitiveness in Europe. If you do not believe me, ask me in 10 years’ time. I can guarantee that this will be the case.
There are three or four issues which I would like to address. First is the issue which has been quite passionately addressed by many of you. The situation is critical; there is no quick fix. There have been some positive developments but it is obvious that we still need a systemic answer to the question. It is not easy but it is more than needed. In that respect, our partner in finding a solution is, of course, Italy, but cooperation with regional authorities in this respect is undoubtedly necessary.
So I am very much looking forward to the evaluation of the new draft waste management plan which we sincerely hope is what we all believe it should be. It will be evaluated by my services, by the experts, and I can assure you that it will be done in such a way that there will be the same treatment for Italy as for any other Member State, because it is of fundamental importance that we keep that trust between Member States on the table.
So when we talk about dealing with these problems, my approach could actually be put into four words. I want to be helpfully strict and strictly helpful. The idea is certainly not to impose fines. As was mentioned by some of you, the idea is to solve problems, but by imposing fines if there is no other way to solve the problems, because that is my duty.
So I am truly doing everything in cooperation with the Italian authorities so that we find proper solutions. That is my sincere hope. At the end of the day, we are talking about the health of Italian citizens and the Italian environment.
The second thing I want to mention is connected with the Waste Framework Directive. It is a new directive which was recently adopted. In that directive, it is pretty clear that each of the countries, as a matter of law, has to introduce a waste hierarchy. That means the best waste is no waste; there is re-use, recycling, energy regeneration and, if there is no other possibility, landfilling.
That is the picture which is taken from the report that will be published tomorrow on how efficient the Member States in the European Union are. It is about the trends in landfilling municipal waste because our best available data are on municipal waste.
Believe it or not, there are five Member States where landfilling is below 5% of municipal waste, but there are also seven Member States where landfilling is over 80%, so we have really very different situations in Europe when we deal with these programmes, and this is an issue which we certainly want to address. This picture is of the situation between 1995 and 2007 and, if it shows anything, it shows that if countries want, they can change. If they organise themselves in a proper way, they can really change.
Fundamentally, you can today divide Europe into two parts: one part which sees waste as a problem and one part which sees waste as a major opportunity for resources and also for the new financial profits because that is the reality. I have heard many stories of the need for the question of who will take the waste to be decided by public procurement, because there are more than the necessary number of users who would like to have it in order to use it. However, for this purpose, the waste has to be selected at the very beginning. That is the fundamental and most important need."@en1
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