Recital 52

(52) The necessary steps should be taken to ensure that, in accordance with Directive 2008/98/EC and other Union legislation on waste, waste shipped within the Union and waste imported into the Union is managed, throughout the duration of the shipment and including recovery or disposal in the country of destination, without endangering human health and the environment. It is also necessary to ensure that waste exported from the Union is managed in an environmentally sound manner throughout the duration of the shipment and including recovery or disposal in the third country of destination. To that end, an obligation should be introduced for exporters of waste to ensure that the facility which receives the waste in a third country of destination is made subject to an audit by an independent third party with appropriate qualifications, prior to exporting waste to the facility in question. The purpose of such audit is to verify compliance of the facility in question with specific criteria laid down in this Regulation, designed to ensure that the waste will be managed in an environmentally sound manner. Where such audit concludes that those specific criteria are not fulfilled by the facility in question, the exporter should not be entitled to export waste to that facility. In order to ensure that audits are conducted in a professional and impartial manner, it is important to set out criteria on the independence and qualifications of the third party auditors, and to make clear that they should be authorised or accredited by an official public authority to perform those activities. The obligation concerning audits should apply with regard to facilities located in all third countries, including those that are members of the OECD. The OECD Decision states that waste exported to another OECD country ‘shall be destined for recovery operations within a recovery facility which will recover the wastes in an environmentally sound manner according to national laws, regulations and practices to which the facility is subject’. The OECD Decision does not contain any element or criterion specifying how to implement that requirement as regards the ‘environmentally sound management’ of waste. In the absence of common criteria defining the conditions under which waste is to be recovered in the relevant facilities, it is necessary to address the risk that waste exported from the Union to countries belonging to the OECD is mismanaged in specific facilities, and hence facilities located in those countries should be subject to the audit requirements laid down in this Regulation.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-03 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.