02/08/2010
- Today (August 2), the National Policy
on Solid Waste (PNRS) - recently approved
by the Brazilian Senate - will receive presidential
approval. The ceremony is scheduled to 3h30
p.m., at the Ministry of External Relations
(Itamaraty), in Brasília. Izabella
Teixeira, minister of the Environment, and
Silvano Silvério, Secretary for Water
Resources and Urban Environment of the MMA,
participate in the event.
The policy will be approved
after two decades in the Brazilian Congress.
It's a historic day in which Brazil will
become equal the European Union in relation
to legislation concerning the solid waste.
"With the approval of the National
Policy on Solid Waste, Brazil now has a
set of innovative tools for solving the
problems of garbage in the country",
celebrates minister Izabella.
The law establishing
the PNRS defines responsibilities and tools
for the management of several types of solid
waste, among them, electronic materials,
for which there is still no federal law
defining how the disposal might happen.
The PNRS is the result
of a broad consensus involving all the actors
who are part of the many different cycles
of production of solid waste. It deals with
issues that are already part of daily routine
of people, involving concepts such as contaminated
area, the product life cycle, selective
collection, social control, waste management,
recycling, shared responsibility and urban
cleaning services.
The new policy aims
at the protection of public health and environmental
quality, as well as at the adoption, development
and improvement of clean technologies to
minimize environmental impacts, and at the
reduction of the volume of hazardous waste,
amongst other actions.
