No abstract

Permanent growth of packaging waste has a negative environmental effect. Therefore, volume and content of packaging are being regulated by relevant legislation. In 1994, the European Union (EU) adopted the Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste (94/62/EC) (subsequently -the Directive), which set the environmental requirements for packaging but did not precisely specify the methods of their implementation. The related harmonised standards EN 13427-13432 partly filled in the gap, but a number of questions have been still left without due explanations. The EU countries were supposed to develop their own legislation, which should have been complemented with the elements that have not been elaborated on the EU level. This task appeared to be complicated for many countries for various reasons, including economic. The cost of implementation of the Directive can be high for a country, especially if it is not done carefully. As a result, the state of implementation of the Directive by the EU countries remains non-uniform. Only a few countries have fully implemented it, while others have just transferred the requirements into their own legislation, but have not implemented the obligatory enforcement measures. A big variety of packaging source reduction policies exist in the EU, which have been developed by the Member States trying to fit them to the country's situation in terms of legislation, institutional infrastructure, conduct of the industry, etc. For this reason, their transfer from one country to another is problematic. Therefore, this study aims to develop a cost-efficient structure of the packaging development process to be applied by both the industry and state enforcement institutions and to fit into the context typical for Lithuania.

The paper presents an analysis of problems which had to be dealt with by Lithuanian institutions while implementing environmental requirements laid down in Article 11 of European Parliament and Council Directive 94/62/EC on Packaging and Packaging Waste as well as in Decision 2009/292/EC of the European Commission establishing the conditions for derogation of plastic crates and plastic pallets related to heavy metal concentration limits set by Directive 94/62/EC. While the Directive puts ban on the usage of packaging with the aggregate concentration of 4 heavy metals (lead, cadmium, mercury and hexavalent chromium) exceeding 100 ppm, Decision 2009/292/EC, instead, allows their usage if terms of derogation specified in the Decision are met. The implementation of the Decision means that each crate and/or pallet item circulating in the market with the concentration of the 4 heavy metals above the set level has to be identified, accounted, traced while in service, must at the end of service be delivered into a controlled recycling system and finally recycled in a way specified by the Decision. Therefore, the establishment of such a country-wide system presents a challenging task for the country as EU legislation sets no common requirements for its structure and leaves it to the country's discretion. This paper systematises and summarises some principles and practices of managing the usage of plastic crates and plastic pallets containing the amount of heavy metals higher than 100 ppm (as set by Directive 94/62/EC) in the EU Member States. The paper analyses possibilities and offers several scenarios for implementation of Directive 94/62/EC with respect to plastic crates and pallets with high concentration of heavy metals in Lithuania. Both the Directive and the Decision are based on using the data available from bookkeeping conducted by owners of crates and pallets and the EU environmental accounting/control system used in the country. The offered mechanisms are analysed and compared between themselves as well as with analogue systems used in other EU countries. Besides, the problem of unidentified plastic crates and plastic pallets already in use is being discussed. A special decision-making tree was developed to allow splitting the stream of these items into 2 flows with the concentration of heavy metals below and above the 100 ppm limit.