Waste amount drops to 117m tonnes in 2017

The total amount of waste decreased to approximately 117 million tonnes in 2017, according to the Statistics Finland.

The drop is mainly caused by a decrease in waste from mining and quarrying compared with 2016. The share of mineral mining, quarrying and processing in the total amount of waste generated was close on 89 million tonnes of surface soil, waste stone and dressing sand.

Another sector that produces considerable amounts of mineral waste is construction. The amount of soil mass classified as construction waste grew by one million tonnes to 13.1 million tonnes over the year. The amount of other waste produced by construction, in turn, decreased to around 1.6 million tonnes.

The total amount of waste in industrial production and the energy sector fell from 10.4 million to around 8.8 million tonnes.

The combined amount of waste from services and households grew by 100,000 tonnes to three million tonnes.

The reduced amount of waste was visible as a drop in the amounts of waste treated. There were no actual new trends between different modes of treatment. The large amount of mineral waste that is stockpiled in the mining areas masks any changes in the different modes of treatment of other waste. Without mineral waste, around 65 per cent of waste was utilised by energy recovery and about 28 per cent by materials recovery, slightly over six per cent ended up at landfill sites.

As in previous years, energy recovery of waste increased, and the landfill disposal decreased when comparing waste amounts without mineral waste generated in mining and quarrying and in construction.