An official signing ceremony for the revised Directive was held in Strasbourg, France, last Wednesday (November 19) and the revised Directive appeared in the OJEU on Saturday (November 22).
The news came as letsrecycle.com learnt that the first meeting of a new Defra-led steering group charged with interpreting and implementing the Directive in the UK was held in the past week.
Publication
Last week's publication comes after EU Council of Ministers voted to approve a revised version of the Waste Framework Directive in October 2008 (see letsrecycle.com story).
Their decision involved the acceptance of a raft of amendments originally passed by the European Parliament in June 2008 (see letsrecycle.com story).
The Directive aims to set a framework for waste management in the EU, promoting both reuse and recycling, including energy recovery as a recovery activity within a revised waste management hierarchy and dealing with 'end of waste' classification.
However, there is uncertainty over the interpretation of the Directive's target for all members states to reach a 50% household recycling and reuse rate by 2020, and in particular whether green and food waste will count towards this goal.
Defra has previously said that it believes organic waste will contribute towards achieving the target (see letsrecycle.com story), and it is believed that this is one of the issues the new steering group will be tasked with working towards.
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