Meeting the challenges of the waste hierarchy: A performance evaluation of EU countries

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to evaluate how well European countries are advancing towards a Circular Economy transition and to which extent they are fulfilling the European Union (EU) requirements in terms of municipal waste management. With this aim, an innovative composite indicator is devised by integrating the Goal Programming Synthetic Indicator (GPSI) methodology with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The suggested methodology allows to encompass not only the guidelines provided by the EU directives and the EU Waste Hierarchy, but also the deviations from the EU thresholds. As a first step of the analysis, a dashboard of indicators is identified together with a set of targets that European countries are supposed to meet. Indicators, targets and their relative importance in the dashboard have been discussed and validated by a team of experts. Then, two Goal Programming Synthetic Indicators are computed taking into account two different perspectives. The first one rewards the countries with good performance in the higher level of the Waste Hierarchy, while the second one penalizes countries whose infringements are in the lower part of the Waste Hierarchy. Hence two different systems of aggregating weights are identified by means of the Analytic Hierarchy Process and accordingly two scenarios are explored. The analysis is performed using Eurostat data on 28 European countries from 2013 to 2018. For each year, countries are assessed in terms of their ability to keep the right waste management track delineated by the Waste Hierarchy principles. Countries’ ranking over time is first obtained and then interpreted in light of countries policies and achievements, deriving policy suggestions to improve waste management strategy able to reach the expected results.

Keywords

• EU Waste Hierarchy
• EU waste targets
• Composite indicator
• Circular economy