Background
The European Union set up rules for waste management and targets for recovery of waste materials to minimise the risks associated with managing waste. European Regulation (EC) No 1013/2006 on shipments of waste (WSR) contains several measures to prevent the illegal shipment of waste. These include obligations on Member States (MS) to carry out waste shipment inspections and to cooperate with other MS.
The ‘Enforcement Actions’ projects have been the cornerstone of IMPEL’s waste shipment enforcement activities for several years, providing ‘on the ground training’ and ensuring a minimum level of inspections in participating countries. It has encouraged co-operation both between neighbouring countries and within jurisdictions – between competent authorities and other enforcement bodies such as the Police and Customs.
Project objectives
In order to contribute to the circular economy package, waste management principles and targets and disrupt, detect and prevent illegal waste trafficking, this project aims to expand the members taking part in and benefiting from the project, increase the capacity of the various actors in the enforcement chain, intensify the collaboration, inspections and enforcement actions, develop and demonstrate innovative tools and technology and establish a EU wide dataset based on inspection data and used for the development of intelligence products.
Project means
- Delivering capacity building activities.
- Development of new systems with a focus on providing tangible benefits to agencies using innovative enforcement, tracking and e-reporting tools.
- Coordinated inspections.
- The involvement of Europol, Customs and national Police Forces in this project to strengthen existing enforcement networks and improve the flow of intelligence on illegal shipments and the actors involved and getting a better understanding of trend and patterns to develop strategies to prevent and disrupt the illegal waste trade.
Expected results
- Increased participation from the European waste shipment regulatory community in order to improve compliance with the EU regulations, by targeting all IMPEL member countries (36) and other law enforcement agencies and the judiciary.
- A trained and collaborative network of frontline enforcement officers. In total five customs training events will be organised, targeting 30 customs officers of 5-6 countries per training event, serving in total 150 customs officers.
- A better common understanding of identified problems and obstacles and enhance a more uniform application of the Waste Shipment Regulation by providing for: an inspection application (app), 16 webinars, an online training toolkit and 30 inspection exchange programmes for officers.
- Performance of EU wide coordinated inspections, including guidance on risk profiling, targeting, inspections methods, reporting, repatriation and follow up. The project aims to perform 10,000 inspections annually. Inspection data will be reported uniformly and analysed.
- A uniform reporting tool, leading to better comparable results and analysis of inspections. This increased dataset will also give a much clearer indication of the level and type of illegal shipments taking place and emerging trends in illegal activity.
- A new tool that maps illegal shipments, scale and routes of waste shipments and create automatic open source maps showing the waste streams involved in illegal shipments, violation type, competent authority co-operation and penalty applied (including repatriations).
- Improved international collaboration and information sharing between authorities resulting in increased repatriations of waste at the intra-community level and an increase in the number of identification of final destination undertaken with enhanced collaboration from international partners.
- Annual best practice meetings and a closing conference on the outcomes and recommendations of the project.
