Abstract:

The problem of waste management represents, after air and climate protection and water resource and waste management, one of the main directions of environmental protection activities. Municipal waste, although it accounts for less than 10% of all the waste produced in the EU in a year, is a very high-profile issue, and managing it in an ecologically rational way can be a huge challenge due to its non-homogeneous composition. The specificity of such waste results to a large extent from different consumption patterns in a given society. The current activities of the European Union aim towards a circular economy. Consequently, the member states are required to implement specified measures and prioritise prevention, reuse and recycling activities over landfilling and incineration. The recycling and landfilling targets set for the next years represent an ambitious path for a better municipal waste management in Europe. The aim of the publication was to examine whether the available EU funds in the current EU budgeting period 2014-2020 are fully used for investments, thus showing effectiveness or ineffectiveness of  management in economic entities, and how these activities impact the state of municipal waste management in Poland. Quantitative methods, including classic descriptive statistics and taxonomic methods based on a linear ordering of objects, were used for the research. The effectiveness of EU funds management was examined in a general way as well as within an environmental dimension through result indicators , broken down into categories by regions. The obtained values of the indicators at the current stage of the conducted analysis are not satisfactory, and that indicates a low level of effectiveness of management and illustrates the fact that much more remains to be done to improve the state of municipal waste mamagement.