Finland – supervision may lead to waste reduction

Finland‘‘s Environmental Administration SYKE has published a guideline for supervisory authorities in the environmental field with a view to preventing and reducing waste arisings and the hazardousness of waste in enterprises subject to approval and supervision. International Wastenews, Waste Centre Denmark no. 1, 2005 reports that so far, environmental supervisory work has focused on getting the basic processes in waste management in place: separation, recycling and post-treatment. And preventing amounts and the hazardousness of waste has not enjoyed much attention in supervisory work.



In the guideline, which so far is only available in Finnish, SYKE provides the supervisory authorities and the enterprises with tools for putting focus on these issues through all the phases in the environmental approval procedures. Thus, it is suggested that al-ready in connection with the application it is important to gather as much information on waste generation in the enterprise as possible. In the consideration of the application, the supervisory authority may negotiate with the applicant the options for reducing waste arisings and substituting any environmentally harmful sub-stances. In the approval, the supervisory authority may incorporate provisions that lead to reductions in waste amounts.



In the section on supervision and control of the approval, milestones may be set up to monitor whether waste arisings and their hazardousness are reduced. The guideline gives concrete directions for how to reduce waste arisings in the different processes in pre-treatment of wood products, treatment of textiles, surface treatment of metals, and in the agri-foodstuffs industry