Waste - Drivers and pressures (Austria)

The main drivers for the selection of waste treatment paths, as shown in Figure 3, were policy drivers such as the ordinances on packaging waste and on biodegradable waste in combination with extensive information and a public awareness programme. Since 2004, the landfill ordinance requires the pretreatment of reactive waste prior to landfilling. Therefore, household waste is incinerated or pretreated in a mechanical biological treatment plant in order to reduce its total organic content. Because of the pretreatment, emissions of greenhouse gases were reduced considerably.

The most important drivers for waste generation are economic and social drivers. In Figure 4 the growth of total waste generation and of household waste arisings in the period 1999 to 2008 is compared to real GDP growth and population growth. Household waste growth seems to be stronger coupled to economic growth rather than total waste growth is. Household waste generation increases much faster than the population. It can be concluded that the main driving force for household waste arising is the affluence of the population. Also changing lifestyles, such as the trend towards single households, can be identified as important social drivers for household waste generation.

One key driver for the increased waste generation was the increased material consumption (caused by production and private consumption). According to (Petrovic, 2008) the Austrian DMC (domestic material consumption) increased from 160 million tons to 171 million tons (7%) from 1998 to 2006. The increase is much lower than the growth of real GDP in this period of 20% (Statistik Austria, 2009a). The total material imports, however, increased from 68 to 87 million tonnes (28%), the metal ore imports by 50% (see Figure 5), and the material exports from 33 to 54 million tonnes (67%) (Petrovic, 2008).

The main pressures induced by waste are greenhouse gas emissions and dissipation of pollutants.

Overall greenhouse gas emissions from waste management and treatment activities during the year 2007 amounted to 2,2 million tonnes CO₂equivalent. Thus waste management was responsible for about 2.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions in Austria in 2007. In 2007, greenhouse gas emissions from the waste sector were 40.4% below the level of the base year 1990 and 19.4% below the level of 1999 (see Figure 4) (Umweltbundesamt, 2009a).

Table 1 shows the lead, cadmium and mercury flows of the Austrian economy for 2005:

• only a small amount of Austria's heavy metal emissions are caused by the waste management sector;
• the main path of pollutants from the waste management sector to the environment is by use of compost;
• in absolute figures, the emissions of lead are the highest, while compared with the system input, mercury emissions are the highest (50% of the input) followed by cadmium (8%) and lead (2% of the input respectively).

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