European Countries: Does common legislation guarantee better hazardous waste performance for European Union member states? Carmen Callao a,⇑ , Margarita Martinez-Nuñez c , M. Pilar Latorre b a Legal Department, Universidad San Jorge, Autovía A-23 Zaragoza-Huescak, Km 299, 50830 Villanueva de Gállego, Zaragoza, Spain b Department of Business & Administration, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y del Trabajo, University of Zaragoza, Violante de Hungría 23, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain c Department of Management Engineering, Business Administration and Statistics, ETSI Sistemas de Telecomunicación, Technical University of Madrid, Ctra de Valencia, Km. 7, 28031 Madrid, Spain article info Article history: Received 19 July 2018 Revised 26 October 2018 Accepted 9 November 2018 Keywords: Hazardous waste management Europe Data envelopment analysis Incineration Disposal Recovery abstract The study of efficiency in hazardous waste management has been proved to be a driving factor for sus- tainable development (SD). This study focuses on a performance assessment of European countries, most of them European Union (EU) member states and candidate countries that share a common legislative framework through European regulations, in order to provide a general understanding of hazardous waste performance. In this paper, we use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to examine the efficiency of 32 countries in Europe by using novel input/output environmental parameters to study the efficiency of the different waste management operations from an environmental point of view. This analysis con- trasts the efficiency in the management of total waste versus hazardous waste and studies three opera- tions with hazardous wastes: incineration and incineration with energy recovery, disposal and recovery. Results show that there are differences in the achievement of efficiency, not only among countries, but also among the different waste management operations analysed. Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Hazardous waste has become one of the most serious problems Europe has to face. In 2014, 2502 million tons of waste was pro- duced in Europe (Eurostat, 2014), of which 95 million tons were hazardous waste. To deal with this problem, the European Union (EU) has devel- oped a set of regulations concerning environmental protection. In this regard, the Waste Framework Directive (WFD) (Directive, 2008) tries to protect the environment and human health from negative effects produced by hazardous waste, and establishes waste prevention at the top of the waste management hierarchy. Through waste prevention, Europe tries to ‘‘reduce the content of harmful substances in materials and products” and, therefore, the amount of hazardous waste produced. But even if waste prevention is at the top of the waste manage- ment hierarchy, the WFD establishes different waste management operations and has considered it necessary to regulate two of them: landfill (Council Directive 1999/31/EC of 26 April 1999 on the landfill of waste, 1999) and incineration (Directive, 2010). Other waste management operations, such as recycling and other recovery operations, are not regulated by directives: instead they are targets introduced by the legislation, as proposed by Gordon (1986), that member states have to achieve. And always having in mind to ensure the objective of hazardous waste man- agement and the optimization of the systems (Nema and Gupta, 1999). These targets are introduced in the Directives, either in the Directives that regulate the operations, as with Landfill Directive; in the WFD, which contains the objectives for household waste and construction and demolition waste or in Directives that regu- late different waste streams, Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (European Parliament and Council Directive 94/62/EC of 20 December 1994 on packaging and packaging waste, 1994), WEEE Directive (‘‘Directive 2012/19/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 July 2012 on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) Text with EEA relevance,” 2012), Directive 2006/66/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 September 2006 on batteries and accumulators and waste batter- ies and accumulators) or Directive 2000/53/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 September 2000 on end-of life vehicles. Although the analysis of the fixed targets and their evolution does not fall under the scope of this research, it is important to https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2018.11.014 0956-053X/Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: ccallao@usj.es (C. Callao), margarita.martinez@upm.es (M. Martinez-Nuñez), latorrep@unizar.es (M.P. Latorre). Waste Management 84 (2019) 147–157 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Waste Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wasman