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Increased recycling has come at the expense of greener activities like reuse. The European Union now needs to adopt a multidimensional approach to tackle Europe's waste problem and move towards circularity, writes Joan Marc Simon.

Looking back, in the last 30 years, Europe has reduced landfilling by around 30% and doubled recycling and incineration figures. At the same time, reuse/refill has been decimated and we are generating 20% more waste per capita. In other words, the bottom of the waste hierarchy has been getting fatter at the expense of the upper side. This confirms that, when the wise man pointed at the moon, all we could see was the waste accumulating on the finger. But it was just a pointer, a symptom. The good news is that we are finally collectively understanding that the solution lies elsewhere.

With a typical estimated lifespan of 20 years, a large quantity of wind turbine blades will need to be decommissioned sometime soon. In fact, it is generally estimated that by 2050 there will be almost 40 million tons of waste material from the global wind industry that will need to be disposed of. But the good news is that there are several companies and research groups that are seeking to find more sustainable ways to recycle and repurpose decommissioned wind turbine blades.

A Japanese village aims to be the first zero waste municipality in the world by 2020 and has already reached an 81% recycling rate. A member of the Japanese Zero Waste Academy told EURACTIV that the feat is replicable elsewhere.