Briefing: One consequence of Maastricht

This article explains the background for many municipalities in the UK having had to move from an unrestricted weekly collection of household waste to a fortnightly collection of limited amounts of residual waste.

Few observers could have anticipated that the signing of the Maastricht Treaty would impact on virtually every household in the UK. Part of the package was that the UK would implement the landfill directive (Council Directive 1999/31/EC) (EC, 1999), which had earlier been bandied back and forth for nearly a decade, with the UK declining to accept its provisions. Initially, it was promoted as a...