The Union of Municipalities of Montenegro has submitted to the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Development of the North its opinion on the Draft Law on Amendments to the Law on Waste Management, with two suggestions aimed at improving waste management practices.
The first suggestion relates to the necessity for legal provisions to fully support the “polluter pays” principle. The Union welcomes the intention to introduce, through amendments to the law, a system of extended responsibility for textile waste, as this will contribute to reducing the amount of waste disposed of in sanitary landfills, thereby extending the lifespan of sanitary landfill cells. Extended producer responsibility is based precisely on the “polluter pays” principle, which implies that the producer bears full financial and organizational responsibility for a product throughout its entire life cycle, including the waste phase. Therefore, the inclusion of local self-government units as mandatory actors in the implementation of extended producer responsibility programmes, as envisaged by the Draft Law, represents a deviation from the fundamental principle that the producer bears full organizational and financial responsibility for managing waste from their products. In accordance with the EU Waste Framework Directive, local self-government may be engaged exclusively as a contracted service provider, with full cost compensation by the producer organization, but not as the holder of responsibility. Therefore, the Union of Municipalities proposes that the Draft Law should stipulate that the organization of the extended responsibility system may include municipal waste collectors, with payment of a fee for the service provided.
The second suggestion concerns the prescribing of an obligation to initiate the procedure for deletion from the register of waste collectors when necessary. The Union of Municipalities considers that this obligation cannot be assigned to a local self-government body. The register of collectors is maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency, and it has been assessed that registration and deletion, as administrative activities preceded by the conduct of an administrative procedure, can only be carried out by the authority competent for maintaining the register. According to the Law on Administrative Procedure, an administrative procedure is initiated and conducted by the competent authority, and therefore an obligation cannot be prescribed to a local government body to initiate a procedure for which it is not competent.
