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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the Ecodesign Directive and the extent to which it provides a regulatory framework for life‐cycle assessment approaches which underlie integrated product policy (IPP), thus providing a horizontal approach to product legislation as a new approach to regulating pollution.

The paper draws on academic commentary as well as official papers, European communications and legislation.

The development and application of the Ecodesign Directive is highlighted along with the different regulatory approach it poses which is shown to result from the application of life‐cycle assessment and IPP.

The impact on the development of products will be extensive in that they will be required by mandatory rules to be designed with a view to the reduction of their whole life environmental impacts.

The approach is to highlight a new paradigm for regulating pollution and environmental impacts.

The aim of the present study is to present in a systematic way the subject of industrial hazardous waste from the point-of-view of definitions in engineering, science and legislation. This analysis is necessary, as many different approaches and overlapping definitions are used for the classification of waste, leading to different results, a situation that often complicates the collection and interpretation of data on waste.

The study is conducted by bringing together the extended experience of the authors and other experts in the field of environmental legislation and a wide variety of scientific and legislative sources as well as articles and research reports. The focus is the European Union, while several approaches from the international area are presented.

The study presents and clarifies several waste typologies and provides a roadmap for professionals and researchers in the field of waste management. Furthermore, the findings reveal the need for a unified and robust definition of the term as well as the need for globalization of similar terms in order to unify and value the relevant data.

The study highlights the problem of definitions and approaches as well as the gap between what engineers and legislation experts mean by the term industrial hazardous waste. The paper represents an effort to establish a basis for unification of the relevant terms.

The paper provides an in-depth analysis on the industrial hazardous waste field and the relevant problems including actual data found in the international literature. The value of the research is that it brings together all existing experience and knowledge in the field in the form of a review paper, useful for professional and policy makers in the field.

The purpose of this paper is first, to gain insight into how the European member states have addressed the concept of sustainability in their building regulatory frameworks; and second, to gain insight in the effects of harmonization attempts of these frameworks by the European Commission (EC).

Data on the member states' building regulatory regimes were gathered using a survey questionnaire. The survey questionnaire addressed over 60 different aspects of sustainable construction that may, in various ways, be regulated by the member states.

The data obtained show mixed results. Some aspects of sustainable construction show far‐reaching homogeneity, whilst others do not. It appears that current EC directives have a positive effect on homogeneity of sustainable construction regulation throughout Europe. However, this does not provide a firm base to advise more directives, as these often appear a too resource‐intensive tool to achieve sustainable construction in a timely fashion. Additional and complementary approaches to such directives are proposed.

The paper presents an overview of how European member states have addressed various aspects of sustainable construction in their construction regulatory frameworks. This provides valuable insights for further studies on regulatory change, regulatory convergence and divergence, and policy outcomes related to sustainable construction in the European Union. Also, the study presents a number of approaches to achieve homogeneity that may complement earlier approaches taken by the EC.

With the UK’s accelerating plans to transition to electric mobility, this paper aims to highlight the need for policies to prepare for appropriate management of electric vehicle (EV) lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) as they reach the end of their life.

This is a regulatory review based on projections of EV LIBs coming off the market and associated problems of waste management together with the development of a servitisation model.

Circular economy in EV LIBs is unlikely to shape itself because LIB recycling is challenging and still in development. LIB volumes are insufficient for recycling to be currently profitable, and a circular economy here will need to be driven by regulatory intervention. Ignoring the problem carries potentially high environmental and health costs. This paper offers potential solutions through new EV ownership models to facilitate a circular economy.

The authors suggest a new EV ownership model. However, despite environmental benefits, re-shaping the fundamentals of market economies can have disruptive effects on current markets. Therefore, further exploration of this topic is needed. Also, the data presented is based on future projections of EV markets, battery lifespan, etc., which are uncertain at present. These are to be taken as estimates only.

The paper proposes regulatory interventions or incentives to fundamentally change consumer ideas of property ownership for EVs, so that EV automotive batteries remain the property of the manufacturer even when the consumer owns the car.

This paper aims to examine the effect of circular economy’s ending of waste on marginal property practices.

This paper utilises doctrinal and theoretical legal analysis, along with theoretical perspectives and qualitative empirical evidence drawn from non-legal academic disciplines.

The current legalistic conception of waste depends on control and value. The indeterminate status of waste as goods at the margins of consumption attracts attention from legal regimes. This process is evidenced by a commercialised treatment of goods at the margins of consumption, limiting the scope of radical marginal property practices such as freeganism (taking goods abandoned by others, to use such goods).

The circular economy aims to end waste. Restriction, and ultimately elimination, of marginal property practices is necessary for circular economy. Freegans will be limited to acting in a “challenge” role, identifying breaches of commercial commodification processes. Control over the use (including disposal) of goods reduces the spaces available for marginal property practices, which in turn raises problematic normative implications for “normal” consumption practices involving waste.

This is the first examination of the impact of circular economy on freeganism. It is also the first sustained application of marginal property theory (van der Walt, 2009) in a legal analysis of circular economy and waste.

Plastics waste management is a critical agenda for the global community. Recycling is the most important strategy option for recovering plastics wastes. This study aims to review reverse logistics (RL) implementation practices and conceptualizing it to the plastic recycling system.

The paper is organized after evaluating the studies related to plastics waste recycling and analyzing the available frameworks to use RL as a strategic tool.

The paper has investigated that previous research on RL implementation focused on a few stages of RL activities and did not include the most important issues. However, for successful RL implementation, taking into account the whole stage and including the most important factors is very important. To elaborate on this finding a new conceptual framework is developed.

The paper is fully based on literature review and international reports. The developed framework is required for further empirical validation in the plastics sector.

The paper has considered the important issues and the applications of those factors that can improve plastics recycling performances.

This study can enhance the active involvement of main actors (plastics producers, users, municipal and recyclers) in the plastics recycling system.

This paper deliberates on how RL can be conceptualized and implemented in plastics recycling systems in considering the most important factors for plastics recycling.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact that property rights can have on the implementation of circular waste economies, in which waste is reused, recycled or recovered, within the European Union’s Waste Framework Directive.

A theoretical lens is applied to the legal definition as well as production and treatment cycle of waste to understand the property rights that can exist in waste.

This paper argues that even though different property rights regimes can apply to waste during its creation, disposal and recovery, the waste management regulatory and legal system is currently predominantly set up to support waste within classic forms of private property ownership. This tends towards commodification and linear systems, which are at odds with an approach that treats waste as a primary wanted resource rather than an unwanted by-product. It is recommended that adopting state or communal property approaches instead could affect systemic transformative change by facilitating the reconceptualisation of waste as a resource for everyone to use.

The property rights issues are only one dimension of a bigger puzzle. The roles of social conceptualisation, norms, regulations and policies in pursuing circular strategies are only touched upon, but not fully explored in this paper. These provide other avenues that can be underpinned by certain property regimes to transition to circular economies.

The literature focused on property rights in waste has been very limited to date. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to consider this question in detail from a legal perspective.

Waste is a resource. Generating energy from waste instead of sending it to landfill avoids methane gas which equals 25 times CO₂ in mass. In combination with the energy efficiency thresholds set in Waste Framework Directive, this could prevent up to a further 45 million tons of CO₂ eq. per year. The purpose of this paper is to present the waste-to-energy (WTE) plants installed in ten European cities which have been selected among the most sustainable cities or among the best cities to live in.

The work is based on literature review and a combination of several statistical data and reports that include the required data.

The European Directives, along with the general thinking that wastes are resources and the effort to reduce the environmental impact in urban environment from waste management, were the driving forces. The most sustainable cities in EU considered that their sustainability is based also in energy recovery from wastes. All of them are using WTE facilities to treat a significant part of their waste in order to produce energy in the form of heat and electricity. And they do it in a very successful and environmental friendly way, as they mainly utilize the waste fractions that cannot be recycled or reused, and they do not landfill these resources. This approach is proving that the sustainable waste management cannot be achieved without WTE facilities, since a fraction of wastes consists of non-recyclable and non-reusable materials, which present significant heating value that cannot be neglected as an energy source.

This paper presents the WTE plants installed in ten European cities which have been selected among the most sustainable cities or among the best cities to live in. This work aims to present the strong and successful relation between WTE and sustainability in the modern complex urban environment.

In the context of the environmental impacts caused due to the increasing volumes of discarded technologies (e-Waste), this paper aims to critically evaluate whether environmental policy, the Waste of Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) legislation in particular can contribute to a shift in logic from neoliberal growth to green growth.

Drawing upon empirical research, this paper shows how three computer waste organisations evolve through the imbrication of pre- and post-policy logics in collaborative and heterogeneous ways to create an “economy of greening”.

Extending the concept of a fractionated trading zone, this paper demonstrates the heterogeneous ways in which computer sourcing is imbricated, providing a taxonomy of imbricating logics. It is argued that what is shared in a fractionated trading zone is a diversity of imbrications. This provides for a nuanced perspective on policy and the management of waste, showing how post-WEEE logics become the condition to continue to pursue pre-WEEE logics.

This research focuses on three organisations and the EU 2003 and UK 2006 versions of the WEEE legislation.

The research findings have important implications, more specifically, for how e-Waste policy is enacted as an “economy of greening” to constitute managerial and organisational adaptation needed to create a sustainable economy and society.

This paper’s contribution is threefold. First, theoretically, the literature on trading zones and imbrication is extended by considering how they can complement one another. Our focus on imbrication is a “zooming in” on the managerial and organisational implications and dynamics of a trading zone. Second, the literature on imbrication is added to by identifying a diverse range of imbricating logics that can be used to discern a more nuanced understanding of the translated effects of policy. Last, these ideas are ground in a relevant empirical context – that of e-waste management in the UK, providing a deeper knowledge, over time, of specific actors’ translations of policy into organisational practices.

All supply chains must address waste management since it is a crucial step toward a sustainable world. This article aims to analyze the potential of blockchain technology in waste management by focusing on the textile sector, which is one of the polluting industries. The study's main objective is to realize businesses' waste management practices and sustainability initiatives and then to comprehend how practitioners perceive the implementation of blockchain technology to waste management.

The waste management procedures and actors' perceptions of blockchain technology are examined using a qualitative study approach that adopts an in-depth interview methodology. The collected data is analyzed by a qualitative analysis software (e.g. MAXQDA).

Findings of the study show that blockchain technology is still in its infancy and needs to be communicated to the actors of the sector. The technology has low potential due to the barriers it faces during the development phase. However, it is considered to be an important technological development for the textile sector stakeholders.

This study is important to notice at what stage the waste management practices and how to develop better with modern technologies like blockchain. Blockchain technology has essential potential for supply chains, but sustainability concerns are becoming a major issue to be solved. Waste management is therefore an important subject to be analyzed and provided with innovative solutions that will contribute to sustainability efforts. To the author's best knowledge, this is the first attempt to comprehend the potential of blockchain in the textile industry in terms of waste management.