Legal Regulation of Waste Management: Current Issues

The author poses a question whether the current legal regulation of waste is proper. The question is answered by analyzing five issues: variety of the concepts of waste (waste can be perceived in distinct manners and the current concept aggravates the solution of two principal waste problems – danger to the environment and danger to human health); non-systematic use of terms (improper terms are used in Lithuanian legal acts); the jurisprudence of Lithuanian courts in explaining the concept of waste (the courts do not perceive waste properly); the twofold term of the municipal/household waste in Lithuanian legal acts (municipal/household waste is regulated by using the same term, thus it is not clear for which waste persons are taxed); the application of the municipal levy for waste management (the current model does not encourage to preserve the environment). The author concludes that the variety of the concepts of waste, the disagreements among the scholars on the question, the difficulties encoutered by the courts and non-ameliorating status of the environment show that it should be reasonable to discard the current legal regulation of waste. The two principal problems posed by waste and unsuccessfully solved by the current legal regulation are determined principally by the objects which are not in any possesion. Then waste should be perceived as an object which is not in a possesion and the legal regulation should be orientated in making all the objects to have a possesor