In 2012, so ran a Eurostat survey this week, each Maltese citizen generated 589kg of municipal waste in the year.

This puts us right at the top of waste generators in Europe, beaten only by Denmark (668kg), Cyprus (663kg), Luxembourg (662kg) and Germany (611kg). 87% of this municipal waste is landfilled – only Romania, with 99% of municipal waste landfilled, is worse than we are.

13% of Malta’s municipal waste is recycled and composted and nothing is incinerated – again another European negative record.

In 2012, recycling and composting of  municipal waste together accounted for more than 50% of waste treated in Germany (65% of waste treated),  Austria (62%) and Belgium (57%). Recycling and composting was also the major part of waste treatment in the  Netherlands (50%), Luxembourg (47%), the United Kingdom (46%), Ireland (45%) and France (39%). In  Finland composting and recycling and incineration had equal shares (both 34%).

Observing the treatment methods separately, recycling was most common in Germany (47% of waste treated),  Slovenia (42%), Ireland (37%), Belgium (36%), Estonia (34%), Denmark and Sweden (both 32%), and composting in Austria (34%), the Netherlands (26%), Belgium (21%), Luxembourg (19%), Germany and the  United Kingdom (both 18%).

Clearly, this affects both our quality of life, our health, our treatment of the limited natural resources we have and undoubtedly our economy. We are light years behind the other EU member states and the much promised upgrade of our national way of life has not followed in this, most basic, task.

This government has been in office for just one year, so it would be unfair to carp that nothing is being done. We are at a stage where we do not know where we will landfill more waste. And, up till now, the two big waste collecting enterprises were engaged in a bitter feud.

Clearly too, far more stringent steps are needed and it is the national mentality that must be changed.

As an example, we refer to a recent EurActiv special report: ‘Belgium takes out the trash’ which says, Belgium’s waste disposal system - in which residents leave coloured bin bags in the streets for collection - has drawn criticism for being unsightly. But critics may not be aware that the country is considered relative disposal “paradise” among experts.

With Europeans throwing away three billion tonnes of waste every year, and the world population set to rise, mitigating the problem has become a priority at the EU level.

“We are going to be hit by a tsunami of waste if all of those additional people coming to this planet - essentially in the developing world - start consuming like we do in Europe,” said Karl Falkenberg, the head the European Commission’s environment directorate.

A number of European countries are trying to swim against the tide, virtually phasing out landfilling, and rapidly increasingly their levels of recycling. According to the Commission, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Belgium are the “most advanced” EU countries, dumping less than 3% of municipal waste, sticking most closely to the targets set in the 2008 Waste Framework Directive, which calls for the recycling of at least 50% of household refuse across the Union, by 2020.

As with any successful initiative, it is people that make it work. Experts credit “behavioural changes” for the success of these countries' waste management strategies. To Olivier de Clercq, a policy officer for waste management and recycling in the Commission’s environment directorate, financial incentives are the key.

“In Belgium, the less you sort, the more you pay,” he told EurActiv, at a conference at the Brussels Press Club last week, referring to the northern European country’s public-private pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) schemes.

In Belgium, residents are required to distribute their waste between three and four differently coloured bags - one for general refuse, for the dump, one for plastics, one for cardboard and another for 'garden waste'. The general bag costs the most. In the Flanders region, residents can pay more than €2 per bag of waste intended for the dump, up to five times more than they pay for bin bags sorted for recyclable waste.

“Financial incentives are changing behaviour,” de Clercq said.

Residents can also be given fines if they do not sort their refuse properly, though most infringements result in a warning from the local municipality. Belgium now recycles or composts 57% of its municipal waste, according to Eurostat.

The statistics are similar in Germany and Austria, at 65% and 62%, respectively. They also work according to PAYT, however using a system in which citizens pay a charge based on the weight of their waste.

Experts at the Brussels conference echoed the call for grassroots action. “We need to [inform] consumers of why they’re recycling, (and) how to recycle”, said Vanya Veras, the secretary general of Municipal Waste Europe. “We need to close that communication loop”.

However, tackling the waste challenge goes beyond household and municipal organisation, with policymakers etching out an important role for industry, or ‘Extended Producer Responsibility’ (EPR) schemes, in particular.