Waste has been a growing problem in Eastern Europe since the early 1990s, when 12 countries begantransitioning to consumer societies producing ever-increasing amounts of waste. The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies suggests that per capita waste levels equalled an average of 360 kilogrammes (kg) in 2000. While this figure is significantly below the 500kg average of Western European countries, a 2008 report by the European Environment Agency suggests the accession states will increase waste production significantly in the next decade reaching 500kg per capita by 2020.
Moreover, this growth in waste production was not met with a growth in recycling. Before Bulgaria began the accession process, for example, recycling rates in Sofia were less than five per cent, with waste almost exclusively going to landfill.
Today, despite EU inclusion, the situation has not wholly improved. The EU’s Waste Framework Directive (WFD), which aimed to create a unified waste policy for the EU-27, has had a mixed impact. The 2020 target of reusing and recycling 50 per cent of municipal and construction waste, for example, does not set individual material targets, so states can target particular materials, which might not necessarily be the most harmful, to reach 50 per cent.  
Furthermore, because of the focus on reducing landfill in the WFD and earlier Landfill Directive, much of Eastern Europe has been pushed to incineration rather than recycling: Bulgaria has built three incinerators in Sofia alone, Estonia’s constructed two, while Poland has proposals for ten.
Despite this there are green hopes. A number of states are creating tighter controls on waste. The Slovak system taxes producers of waste, using the proceeds to invest in more expensive recycling facilities.  The Czech government has gone further and banned incineration. The future also looks positive in terms of future entrants to the EU. Croatia, the current favourite for accession, is leading the way in European domestic legislation. Its Ordinance of Packaging and Packaging Waste not only meets the criteria of the EU’s legislation but also achieves around a 90 per cent efficiency rate, according to a forthcoming study by Friends of the Earth Croatia. Under the ordinance retailers and recovery companies pay customers to return waste and submit monthly levels of collection to the government, before selling the material to producers at a fixed, government-set price. In the first two years of the policy, over two billion packaging units, six per cent of municipal waste, were recovered. The recycling rates in Croatia suggest that, when the political and public will is present, market incentives and recovery systems can redirect material from incineration and landfill to recovery. For MEP Caroline Jackson, such an approach “is the only way that those Eastern European countries currently in the EU can hope to meet the 2020 target of 50 per cent”.  
The question, then, is this: How can incentives be structured to create a coherent, sustainable waste management policy that does not let both waste and policy targets go up in smoke?