There has been some movement in a multi-year dispute about waste illegally shipped from Germany to Poland. The administrative office (Landesdirektion) of the state of Saxony has started a tendering process for the retrieval and legally compliant waste management of 20,000 tonnes of zinc waelz slag from Tuplice, Poland.
The state has budgeted €2.521m for this tender, a public official told EUWID, confirming a report published by the online portal muellrausch.de at the end of April. The contract has not yet been awarded. The specifications say that the retrieval and management of the waste must be completed by the end of October.
The state of Saxony is carrying out the retrieval of this waste under a legal procedure known as "substitute performance”, an enforcement measure when the obligated party cannot or will not carry out the action. Originally, the authorities had obligated the company that shipped the waste – according to the Bild newspaper, it was the firm Mineral Projekt Gesellschaft für Planung und Konstruktion mbH, based in Chemnitz – to take back the 20,000 tonnes of zinc waelz slag from Tuplice. However, that company became insolvent in 2019 and was subsequently liquidated.
Saxony’s administrative office then issued a notice of performance obliging the producer of the waste, Befesa Zinc Freiberg GmbH, which specialises in recycling zinc-bearing dust from electric arc furnace (EAF) steel mills, to pay the costs of retrieving and managing the waste.
Befesa challenged this and applied for a temporary injunction. The state administrative told EUWID that no final decision had yet been made about the temporary injunction. No date has yet been set for the legal dispute to be heard by the higher administrative court in Bautzen, according to the state representative.
Authorities see no evidence of further illegal shipments from Saxony
However, Tuplice is just one of seven sites in Poland where illegally imported waste was stored, according to the Polish environment ministry. It alleges a total of 35,000 tonnes of waste were illegally shipped – primarily from Germany – to sites in Tuplice, Stary Jawor, Sobolew, Gliwice, Sarbia, Bzowo and Babin. As previously reported, Poland filed a complaint to the European Commission about these illegal waste exports and was subsequently given the go-ahead to take Germany to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in relation to the Tuplice and Stary Jawor cases. For the waste stored at the five other sites, the Commission found that the evidence brought by Poland was insufficient.
The administrative office in Saxony confirmed to EUWID that it had also investigated the waste deposited in Stary Jawor and Sobolew but could not find evidence that these waste volumes were shipped by a company operating in Saxony. The waste deposited at other sites in Poland did not stem from shipments originating in Saxony, according to the state administrative office.
Poland reports successful return of misdeclared metal waste
Poland continues to battle with illegal waste imports. As the country’s Environmental Protection Inspectorate GIOS announced in late April, an illegal waste shipment stopped by customs authorities in March was returned to Germany.
This case involved the import of 24 tonnes of material declared to consist of green-listed waste. However, an inspection revealed that the transported waste was actually made up of a mixture of metallic and other types of waste, including rubber components, pieces of plastic and cardboard. It was therefore determined that the import was illegal.
