Enforcement Actions II Project
Interim report released
The enforcement actions project management has released its interim report. The report describes the preliminary results of the IMPEL-TFS Enforcement Actions II project carried out from October 2008 through May 2009 by 22 Member States and 4 further European countries.
The report is available here.
Newsletter
The latest edition of the Enforcement Actions II Project newsletter is available. The newsletter gives an update of the projects achievements. It furthermore includes interesting stories by inspectors about their inspections performed during the project and some interesting links. As this phase of the project is coming to an end, the final report will be published in July 2009. A follow up is foreseen after the summer break.
Project background
The Enforcement Actions II Project successfully started in October 2008. 51 participants of national enforcement authorities gathered for the start conference held in Utrecht organized by the Inspectorate of the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment, The Netherlands with support of the EU Commission. 24 countries decided to participate in the project.
Main project activities are transport and company inspections as well as the exchange of experts. Special attention shall be paid to undeclared waste shipments, waste electronic equipment, end of life vehicles, green listed waste, batteries, household waste, and waste falsely declared as second hand goods. A major focus will be exports of waste to non-OECD countries and imports of waste into new Member States. A further focus is put on cooperation between environmental inspectorates, custom services, police and port authorities.
The participants of the Start Conference agreed on 3 periods of joint and coordinated enforcement actions in throughout the duration of the project. In total more than 50 inspections have been carried out between October and December 2008 by AT, BE, HR, CZ, DE, DK, FR, IE, LV, NL, PT, RS, SI and UK-NI. Road transport inspections are the most common type of inspections conducted within this project, followed by seaport inspections (containers) and company inspections. In total about 950 shipment controls have been carried out until December 2008. Out of these slightly above 200 transports were related to transfrontier waste shipment. In about 25% of the waste related transports, violations of the waste shipment regulations were detected. The experts in CZ and RS focused on company inspections. Besides violations of the export ban to third countries (before all WEEE to Africa or contaminated “paper” to Asia), invalid transporters permits or missing or incomplete annexes have been the major reasons for reported violations.
Exchange programmes for inspectors are also provided for. Learning by doing and knowledge exchange are two of the major objectives of this joint action. 4 Exchanges already took place in 2008 in addition currently 9 exchanges are already planned and still more experts could be financed.