Changes in municipal waste management following the amendment of the act on maintaining the cleanliness and order in communes

A new act on maintaining the cleanliness and order in communes of 1 July, 2011, will become effective in Poland on 1 January, 2012. The act will come fully into force on 1 July, 2013. According to this act regulations, commune self-governments take over the obligations of the property owners concerning waste management, moreover, they become responsible for construction and maintenance of the infrastructure supporting recycling and waste disposal processes. The self-governments were granted a 1.5 year transition period to implement the act regulations.The introduced changes are an adjustment of Polish regulation to the European law. Only in Poland and Hungary local self-governments have not yet been responsible for management of waste generated in their areas.The article presents an analysis of the basic changes introduced by the act to the Polish system of municipal waste management. Presented are also the estimates of the mass of wastes collected on the territory of Poland with particular regard to the Małopolskie voivodeship. Calculations and forecasts were made on the basis of information collected by the Main Statistical Office (GUS) and commune offices, where systems similar to the one introduced by the act have been operating for several years. The act assumes that all citizens of Poland will be covered by a system of waste collection, but will also have to pay so called "garbage tax", which should translate into increased amount of collected wastes, especially in these communes where wastes collection system was faulty. In Małopolskie only in 30 communes the 100% of inhabitants have signed contracts for garbage disposal. In the communes where the modern municipal waste management system has been operating, the increase in the mass of collected wastes (for the first three years of system operation) ranged between 31% and 94% in relation to the mass collected in the year preceding the introduction of the new system, although over 90% of local inhabitants were covered by the previous system. As results from the analyses, after introducing the new act the amount of wastes collected in the Małopolskie voivodeship may increase from the level of 765,000 Mg (2010) to over 1.1 M Mg (1.4 M Mg according to less optimistic forecasts), assuming that all generated wastes will be collected (the same amount as in 2010). In some of the Małopolskie communes the estimated increase in collected municipal wastes may reach over 500%.