Combatting waste crime

Waste crime is a serious and growing threat to the quality of the environment, the integrity of ecosystems and human health. It challenges legitimate economies and the rule of law. As environmental legislation advances, requiring stricter pollution control measures, compliance costs increase . This resulted in the waste industry becoming a sector of high economic importance where waste criminals -in an effort to reduce costs- exploit regional inequalities such as labour laws, weak environmental legislation and law enforcement capacity to displace their criminal activities where the risk of detention is lower. Given that the waste sector is an un-level global playing field with asymmetries between countries in laws, politics, culture, knowledge and awareness , waste crime is a phenomenon of low risk and high profit, which is constantly increasing and expanding.

Waste crimes refers to the trade, treatment or disposal of waste in ways that breach international or domestic environmental legislation and cause harm or risk to the environment and human health. This can refer to administrative/regulatory violations (e.g. in case of non-compliance with license requirements) as well as breaches of criminal law (e.g. deliberately causing harm). Some waste materials are particularly vulnerable to waste crime, such as Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEEs), whereas there are some major waste destinations for each of them. Indicatively, according to the UN report ‘The State of Knowledge of crimes that have serious impacts on the environment’, China for plastic and paper, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, Somalia and Senegal for scrap cars and home appliances, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Senegal, China, India and Vietnam for WEEEs, Tunisia, India, Albania, Arab Emirates for textile waste. In addition to this, based on the recent INTERPOL report, construction and demolition waste from the car industry accounted for the largest share of waste in illegal dumping sites, while WEEEs was prevalent in illicit shipments, followed by metal waste and waste from car industry.

Emphasis on preliminary ruling procedure when enforcing EU instruments for combatting waste crime
Matthias Keller

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