Environmental protection expenditure on waste management

Short description

Money spent on all activities directly aimed at the prevention, reduction and elimination of pollution or nuisances resulting from waste management activities. Excluded are activities that, while beneficial to the environment, primarily satisfy technical needs or health and safety requirements (Eurostat).

Meta data

Unit:

EUR per capita

Methodology link:

Methodology

Original data

Data:

EnvironmentalExpenditureWasteManagement.csv

Unit for original data:

Million EUR

Date of extraction:

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Data source link:

Eurostat

Rationale

Good waste management needs a budget. The indicator shows expenditure on solid waste management activities in Europe. Higher spending partly reflects better care for the environment and human health but may also reflect inefficiency. The indicator excludes spending on waste water management.

Limitations

Spending on waste management can indicate good care but also inefficiency. In a circular economy, spending on waste should actually be very low, since wastes are used as resources and the “waste sector” as such would not exist. In the current system, the indicator is instructive, but in a transformative future, it loses its meaning.

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The indicator is relevant to the following innovation systems on this website

Waste and recycling

Waste treatment and recycling have an important role in building a resource-efficient circular economy.