Portugal

Published today, European Environment Agency’s (EEA) updated European city air quality viewer shows that people in Uppsala and Umeå, Sweden, and Faro, Portugal, can enjoy the cleanest city air in Europe.

18 Member States are at risk of missing one or both of the 2025 targets.

This Outlook can help decision-makers understand the direction in which we are heading and help to assess which policies can support a more circular economy. The OECD stands ready to assist governments in making this transition by designing, developing and delivering better resource efficiency policies for better lives.

A report by Ecologic Institute and Climact shows that the draft National Energy and Climate Plans presented by governments at the start of 2019 are in acute need of improvement. They suffer from inadequate targets and insufficient details on the policies and financing needed to move towards net-zero emission economies in Europe. Member States also need to do better in involving their national stakeholders in providing input to the plans, to benefit from their expertise and to get them on board for future policies. Good practice examples exist around the EU to serve as inspiration for the final plans due by the end of the year.

New book on modern WTE technology and some of its applications around the world by Dr. Efstatios Kalogirou, member of the Global WtERT Council and co-founder of WtERT-Greece. It discusses thermal treatment technologies, including combustion, novel gasification, plasma gasification, and pyrolysis. Furthermore it offers 35 real-world international case studies from the Americas, Asia, Europe, as well as Africa and provides different approaches for different geographic areas.

This article gives an overview on the Malta North Waste Treatment Plant (MNWTP), presenting as well experiences and results during the start-up phase and the guarantee tests executed in 2016.

This Study to assess the implementation by EU Member States of certain provisions of Directive 1999/31/EC on the landfill of waste, carried out for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Environment (DG Environment), investigates the situation in the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU) as regards the landfilling of untreated non-hazardous municipal solid waste.

The paper focuses on the utilisation of the solid product from the biological Treatment stages of three MBT Plants which treat the organic fraction of MSW by means of wet mechanical pre-treatment units followed by anaerobic digestion. The experiences of two MBT Plants in Portugal (CVO Valorlis and CVO Suldouro) which produce compost-like material are contrasted with the experiences at the MBT Bredbury Parkway (UK) which, by drying the digested solids, produces a RDF with low calorific value for further use in thermal valorisation. The impact of these two different approaches on the operating costs for the treatment of the digested solids as well as the environmental aspects for both valorization paths is discussed.

The key for the successful anaerobic digestion of biowaste and/or municipal solid waste is an efficient removal of the impurities before the digestion step. This is not only indispensable for the reliability of the process and therefore the plant availability, but furthermore for the quality of the produced digestate or final compost. With the existing developments within the EU, the quality of the digestate / compost has become a focus of attention. Further Authors: P. Bolzano - Biotec Sistemi s.r.l. J. Del’haye - IVVO

The regulation of risks created or made more acute by contemporary industrial and technological society (including environmental pollution, food contamination, potential environmental or public health impacts of high-voltage electric grids or of genetically modified agriculture and food) has been the focus of significant attention from the social sciences in recent decades. Analyses of risk regulation have fostered greater interest in studying the regulation of economic and social activities. In a broad sense, regulation means the control of a public agency over the activities that are valued by a community.1 More specifically, regulation can be understood to consist of legislative, administrative or conventional measures through which the state determines, controls or shapes the behaviour of economic or social agents, either directly or through delegation, to prevent the harmful effects of such behaviour on socially respected interests or values, and to guide them into directions which are socially desirable.

Over the last few years, global energy demand has risen, and this trend is expected to continue. Almost all European Union (EU) countries are suffering from a shortage of energy services. Annually, EU fossil fuel energy production falls; for example, in 2014, gas production fell by 11.2% compared to 2013. Energy imports, especially natural gas, have increased as a result of lower energy output. The EU is still heavily reliant on fossil fuel imports (oil and gas), and the cost of EU energy imports in 2017 increased by 26% (€266 billion).

As reflected in the proposals included in the “Fit for 55” climate package, sustainable waste management may contribute to the European goals of emissions reduction. Waste-to-Energy has an instrumental role in the treatment of non-recyclable waste.

The use of biomarkers has become attractive and useful for monitoring environmental quality and health of fish inhabiting polluted ecosystems. Among them, plasmatic biochemical parameters could be a promissory indicator of fish health condition. The question that arises is if these parameters can be applied to chronic toxicity. In this study we investigated the use of plasmatic biochemical parameters as indicators of fish chronic exposure to metals.