Waste - Outlook 2020 (Finland)

There are no official specific quantitative outlooks for waste.

The National Waste Plan[1] sets targets for 2016. One of the main targets is to maintain the volume of municipal solid waste at the 2000 level and then achieve a decrease by 2016. Another target is to recycle 50 % of municipal waste, obtaining energy from 30 % and ensuring that no more than 20 % are disposed in landfills. Additional targets are:

• to recover all manure from farming activity

• to treat 90 % of sludge originating from sparsely-populated areas in sewage treatment plants and 10 % in farm biogas installations

• to recover materials or energy from 70 % of all construction and demolition waste

• to replace 5 % of the natural gravel and crushed rocks used in construction and other activities with industrial and/or mining waste

• to recover 100 % of municipal sewage.

A recent study[2] focused on the development of municipal waste. Six different scenarios were used to predict the amount of municipal waste in 2030, and the results ranged from 1.81 to 4.45 million tonnes of municipal waste; the amount in 2008 was 2.77 million tonnes. In the study, also the development of seven different fractions of the municipal waste was estimated using three of the six scenarios.