Environmental protection and communal waste management

Environmental protection and communal waste management are some of the biggest challenges in the negotiation process for EU membership. Five years after the adoption of the Strategy for Waste Management 2010-2019, only seven out of planned 26 regional centres for communal waste disposal operate in Serbia. Is this an indicator that environment issues are rather low on the Government’s priority list, even though its significance has been confirmed several times in the context of pre-accession negotiations between Serbia and the EU? IS it enough to prepare an (announced) revision of the Strategy and reduce the number of planned regional centres in order to regulate the field of waste management in a proper way? Or are there better ways to fulfil the goals defined in the Strategy? In this policy brief we analysed the results of policies in the field of environmental protection and communal waste management and drawn the key recommendations for the following period.