Thank you to the rapporteurs, Caroline Jackson and Johannes Blokland.

The Green/EFA group was very disappointed in the Commission's proposal. Instead of moving ahead to focus on prevention, reuse and recycling it was in fact a step backwards. A worrying combination of no action or targets on preventing, reusing and recycling; plenty of legal loopholes for unscrupulous operators and the promotion of incineration. It sends out the completely wrong message to everyone involved in the waste management.

We had good cooperation between the shadow rapporteurs leading up to committee vote and agreed on many compromise amendments. Although it did not go as far as we wanted it moved the proposal ahead to such an extent that the Green/EFA group withdrew our amendment rejecting the Commission's proposal outright. I very much hope that we can vote for the report tomorrow if the European Parliament upholds the position of the Environment Committee but I fear that will not be the case.

The basis of the whole waste strategy must be a binding five step waste hierarchy of prevention, re-use, recycling, recovery and disposal.

It is essential to have national prevention programmes, with Europe wide measures and targets. Prevention has been talked about an awful lot since the first directive back in 1975 but we've seen very little action and heard many excuses for not doing it. The target of stabilisation by 2012 is weaker than our original proposal but we will to accept it to ensure that prevention programmes with binding targets are included.

We also support EU wide recycling targets. 50% recycling level for municipal waste and 70% for construction, demolition, industrial and manufacturing waste by 2020 is perfectly achievable and realistic.

And as everything cannot and should not be included in one framework directive, we also want the Commission to bring forward proposals on specific waste streams before the end of 2008, and in the case of biodegradable waste by the end of 2007.

But the key issue for us in this directive is incineration. Reclassifying waste incineration as energy recovery operations would completely undermine any measures on preventing and recycling.

Yes, we have to move away from landfill, that is a legal obligation already, but incineration is not the answer. It is blatantly contradictory to endorse a five step hierarchy and then upgrade and give incentives to the lowest level of that hierarchy.

As a recent Friends of the Earth report showed, even when they create energy, incineration produces a third more carbon dioxide than even a gas fired power station. It is not a form of either green energy or safe waste disposal and we should not participate in the 'green washing' of incineration.