The End-of-Waste for the Transition to Circular Economy: A Legal Review of the European Union Waste Framework Directive

The generation of waste is certain and unavoidable. Waste will always exist in some form. It is, however, possible to minimize waste generation and thereby improve virgin resource utilization. Within the European Union, the concept of End of Waste is a legal instrument adopted to facilitate the transition from waste to product, thus by extension facilitate the conditions for a circular economy. In this paper, the implications of the legal definition transforming waste to product, End of Waste, is discussed against the backdrop of waste as a potential resource. Through legal analysis, three primary issues regarding the current formulation of article 6(1) of the Waste Framework Directive (2008/98/EC) are highlighted: (1) the cumulative conditions stated in article 6(1) creating (unnecessary) bottlenecks; (2) the fact that the conditions for End of Waste originally were intended to be operationalized through legislative acts, such as the regulation for iron scrap or glass cullet; and (3) the fact that there is no clear indication of what level of proof the conditions stated in article 6(1) requires and the ambiguity of its application this implies in general. The fact that there must be a specified use as well as a market for a ‘waste’ to transform into something else implies that the underlying idea of the incorporation of End of Waste loses some of its meaning.