Municipal Waste in Europe - Towards a European Recycling Society Collectively authored by the ACR (Association of Cities and Regions for Recycling and Sustainable Resource Management) Synopsis What are the problems of municipal waste in European cities? What operational choices must be made to optimize waste management? Which policy guidelines and legal frameworks will prevail? All these questions are answered in this book. The authors seek to clarify the quantitative and qualitative dimension of the "waste mountain" which governments are facing, and highlight the many aspects of the challenge. They examine systematically the evolution of the European policy framework, especially the new “Waste Directive" of November 22, 2008. Moving on, they study different approaches to reducing waste at the source, to organizing collection, to the choice of treatment methods, and evaluate the management costs of each. In terms of the areas covered and the amount of lessons that can be learnt, this book is already a source of reference. The authors belong to the ACR collective: the ACR (the Association of Cities and Regions for Recycling and Sustainable Resource Management) is a European network and was able to achieve this synthesis through its unique experience of fifteen years of international exchange on the issue of municipal waste.

Review 1 This is an excellent book on recycling and waste management from the local authority perspective. Local authorities in the UK have different approaches to the issue of domestic waste, some being more favourable to recycling than others. As refuse collection takes a major chunk of the council tax budget, everyone has a vested interest in seeing it spent wisely. By sharing good practice, councils can all learn from each other and develop a productive way forward. At 200 pages, concise and up to date, this should be read by all local authority officials with a waste management role. (Posted by Skip Hire)

Review 2 Recycling is all very well, but I now have approximately twelve different containers for sticking my rubbish in. Things were much simpler with one. (Posted by Hard Working Families)

Review 3 Councils are the biggest wasters of all. Do we really need them? (Posted by David Cameron)