Landfills, numbers and capacity in the Netherlands, 1991-2001
| Number | Quantity | Residual | Capacity in | |
| capacity | procedure1) | |||
| absolute | billion kg | million m3 | ||
| 1991 | 90 | . | . | . |
| 1992 | 72 | 13.3 | 65.7 | 78.0 |
| 1993 | 69 | 13.0 | 82.3 | 46.4 |
| 1994 | 56 | 12.2 | 83.9 | 41.8 |
| 1995 | 46 | 9.8 | 80.0 | 28.1 |
| 1996 | 47 | 8.5 | 76.0 | 17.1 |
| 1997 | 44 | 7.4 | 73.9 | 14.2 |
| 1998 | 41 | 7.1 | 69.4 | 6.7 |
| 1999 | 38 | 7.6 | 63.9 | 6.7 |
| 2000 | 36 | 6.5 | 56.6 | 17.9 |
| 2001 | 32 | 6.5 | 53.0 | 13.2 |
| Source: WAR. | RIVM/EDC/Oct02/0393 | |||
| 1) Capacity of new landfill sites and parts of existing sites for which a permit application has been submitted. | ||||
Number of landfills
The number of landfills has fallen sharply in recent years. The causes are:
- the policy of minimising the amount of waste sent to landfill;
- the fact that environmental standards have become stricter over the course of time;
- planning problems.
Quantity of waste sent to landfill
The quantity of waste sent to landfill has halved since the early nineties. In recent years, this quantity has stabilised. The amount of waste sent to landfill by companies on their own sites (which is not included in the figures in the table) has fallen very sharply: from more than two billion kg a year in the early nineties to a figure in excess of 0.25 billion kg in 2001.
Policy
The reduction of the amount of waste sent to landfill has been a priority of the waste policy in the Netherlands for a long time now. Numerous measures have been put into place to reduce landfill use. They vary from the encouragement of prevention and reuse and increasing incineration capacity to the introduction of landfill bans and the imposition of a landfill tax for reusable or combustible waste (currently, approximately EUR 75 per ton).
The national waste management plan (Landelijk afvalbeheersplan), that came into effect in late 2002, is intended to bring about a further reduction of the amount of waste destined for landfill to 2 billion kg in 2012. The idea is to achieve this goal by the optimal exploitation of the energy content of waste that cannot be reused. This can be done by using high-calorific, post-segregation waste in plants with a high energy yield.
