Landfilling of Waste

Preface

These Guidelines should be regarded as a contribution to an overall environmental policy in which the overall objective is to reduce the amounts of and environmental impact from all types of waste, to channel the greatest possible quantity of waste to recycling, and to incinerate waste with energy recovery.

Landfilling will thus become the form of treatment which has the lowest priority.

The starting point for these Guidelines is an objective of the environmental policy to the effect that each generation must deal with its own waste so that it does not become an environmental threat to future generations. In other words, the starting point for these Guidelines is basically different from the earlier guidelines for waste landfilling. Chapter 2: "Overall Landfill Strategy" describes the new principles on which the Guidelines are based.

These Guidelines for landfilling of waste supersede the Danish Environmental Protection Agency’s earlier Guidelines No. 4/1982: "Guidelines for Landfilling of Waste".

The Guidelines are being published in spite of the fact that, as they go to press, work isin progress to draw up a common EU directive on the landfill of waste. The Guidelines are closely associated with the principles of the draft directive submitted by the Commission on 5 March 1997, but it is reasonable to assume that amendments/additions will be made to these Guidelines as soon as the draft directive has been finally adopted.