A ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has given Greece a lump sum fine of €10 million for failure to comply with the Waste Management Directive of the EU. Furthermore, until the 2005 judgment is complied with in full, Greece will have to pay more than €14 million for each six-month period of delay.

Greece’s Environment, Energy and Climate Change Ministry said that the heavy fine may be drastically lowered or even zeroed as the ministry has taken steps to fix the problem since the May 2014 trial.

The trial took place in June 2014 when Greece had 70 open and 223 inactive unregulated dumps. Since then, 48 dumps have been restored, 31 stopped operating and the restoration of the rest is currently planned.

“In the next few years, we will be faced with new fines,” said Environmental Protection Permanent Bipartisan Committee President Dionysia Avgerinopoulou. “Greece doesn’t implement recycling to the degree required and we haven’t done what’s necessary to properly manage toxic, dangerous and hospital waste.”

Under the ‘Waste Directive’, Member States must ensure that waste is recovered or disposed of without endangering human life and without harming the environment; they are also required to prohibit the abandonment, dumping or uncontrolled disposal of waste.

Every holder of waste must have it handled by an undertaking which undertakes its recovery or disposal in accordance with the directive.Each such undertaking must obtain a permit from the competent authority. In a first judgment delivered in 2005, the Court declared that Greece had infringed the directive, on the ground that, by February 2004, 125 uncontrolled waste disposal sites remained in operation on Greek territory and the closure of all illegal and uncontrolled landfills was not scheduled to take place until some time in 2008.

In 2009, on the view that Greece had not complied in full with the 2005 judgment, the Commission sent it a letter of formal notice, followed, in 2010, by a supplementary letter of formal notice.

In 2013, believing that a structural problem continued to exist, in terms of both the number of uncontrolled landfills and the lack of sufficient sites suitable for waste disposal, the Commission decided to bring the present action.

In response to a question from the Court, Greece and the Commission informed it that, in May 2014, out of a total of 293 illegal landfills, 70 remained operational and 223, although closed down, had not yet been cleaned up.

In today’s judgment, the Court states that, by the reference date of 29 December 2010, according to information that Greece produced before the Court in May 2014, Greece had not yet adopted all the measures necessary to comply in full with the 2005 judgment.  That being so, the Court considers it justifiable to impose financial penalties on Greece. Compliance with the 2005 judgment – in other words, compliance with the directive – presupposes: closure of illegal landfills; their actual cleaning up, not merely the planning of their cleaning up; and creation of the necessary facilities for ensuring permanent compliance with Directive 75/442 and prevention of the creation of new illegal landfills.

The Court found it appropriate to fix the penalty payment on a six-monthly basis, in order to enable the Commission to assess the state of progress of the measures for compliance with the 2005 judgment. Accordingly, in respect of the first six-month period following delivery of today’s judgment, the penalty payment will be calculated on the basis of an initial amount of €14,520,000, from which the sum of €40,000 is to be deducted for each landfill closed down or cleaned up and €80,000 is to be deducted for each landfill both closed down and cleaned up.

The penalty payment due in respect of every six-month period thereafter is to be calculated on the basis of the amount of the penalty payment set for the preceding six-month period, from which the same deductions are to be made in respect of the closing down and/or cleaning up of sites during the six-month period in question.

Additionally, the Court decided that the effective prevention of future repetition of infringements of EU law similar to that established by the 2005 judgment requires the adoption of a dissuasive measure, such as the imposition of a lump sum payment. In fixing the lump sum, the Court takes account (as it did in relation to the penalty payment) the seriousness and the duration of the infringement, as well as Greece’s capacity to pay. The Court therefore orders Greece to pay a lump sum of €10 million.