Recycling Directives in the EU: Transposition and the Disservice of Lobbying

The European Union (EU) is lacking a secure and sustainable access to specific non-energetic raw materials. One political measure to reduce the dependency of supply from international markets is to enhance the economic sustainability of metals through recycling. However, the transposition of relevant EU directives to advance this political measure is far from being convergent. What factors explain the non-compliance of EU member states with regards to directives promoting the recycling of metals? Empirical analyses on the transposition of EU law mostly investigate directives regardless of their affiliation to a policy area and therefore do not account for policy-specific issues. Moreover, case studies covering the transposition of selected directives or specific member states suffer from the inability to generalize findings. Hence, I find that there is a lack of quantitative research on the variance of infringement cases concerning directives on metal recycling and, in a broader sense, on waste. I argue that specific domestic interests with regards to the transposition of the directives on packaging and packaging waste, end-of life vehicles as well as batteries and accumulators affect compliance. Applying a conditional risk-set model, my findings show that those EU member states, which import high volumes of primary raw materials and where industries should have a particular interest in promoting metal recycling, paradoxically have difficulties to comply with the directives.