Dakkus wrote:They have a deposit system at least in Estonia, Sweden, Norway and IIRC Denmark. And in Finland there are almost no bottles at all outside the deposit system. In southern Europe it's of course different, because they are still lagging behind when it comes to nature friendliness.
This statement is not correct.
It is a very nordic point of view of considering southern countries as dirty, nature unfriendly, and when it comes to elections, obviously southern countries are cheaters !
These are very dangerous cliché's that I am unhappy to read too often on the EBT-forum.
Your statement is not correct because the non-existence of the deposit system in Southern Europe responses to another issue : the deposit system is seen as a hinder to free trade of goods. (when you buy a bottle of water in Germany and you drink it in Belgium, you can not get reimburse, unless you go back to Germany...).
Theremore, the traffic generated by the bottle collection can be ecologicaly speaking a real nightmare.
So the discussions at EU level on this specific point have never reached an agreement.
Mostly because the issues about waste management have been left over to national authorities. The EU has only been fixing objectives regarding a level of recycling to bereached and no the method to reach these objectives.
I can give you a lot of other examples where Nordic countries are not very regarding to there environment.
For example the Finnish company Vapo Oy produces energy whilst burning peat and other constituents. Peat originates from peatlands which are very sensible areas regarding biodiversity, ecology and water reserve.
This same Finnish company provides also energy in Sweden where the access to energy peat is more limited, because swedish people want to better the protection of their own peatlands... But, they have absolutely no problem in importing their energy peat from Belarus which is the last didactorship in Europe and where peatlands are used without any consideration to environmental protection.
I'll take another example for the use and reuse of waste products : the use of sludges and composts of sludges in agirculture, which has proven to be safe for the 4 past decades is always an issue in "clean, nordic" countries. I have personnaly succeeded to get some improvements and changes at Eu regulations on this point, opening the door to other treatments in Germany, that up to now were limited to stocking these sludges in waste deposists (un contradiction to the EU regulation on waste treatments) or by the incineration. It is not unnecessary to mention that the incineration of sludges conumes a lot of energy (burning water costs !) and generates dioxines taht are cancerogenic to mammifers (including humans)
This long reply to explain that Southern Europe is not "always" lagging behind regarding nature protection.
And that, e.g. France is the industrial country that emits the least CO2, thanks to its nuclear power production
Please don't state that I am off-topic, I simply ansered to a very unpleasant remark.
And if you wonder, yes, I am a lobbyist and I am proud to be !
), and hope to stay there for a couple of days. Then I'm planning to go to another German island, Sylt, before finally returning home on Saturday the 25th.
