Increased competition typically leads to competitive prices and a greater variety of services, but things have worked out quite differently in one sector of Poland's economy
By Wojciech Kosc
After years of fragmentation, Poland's recycling and packaging waste recovery market is becoming more consolidated. The smallest, least effective and least efficient companies are either going out of business or are being forced to merge with bigger players. This development will hopefully improve Poland's track record of packaging waste management.
The main problem is that the excessive number of recovery and recycling companies in Poland has actually been a harmful influence on the market. Companies that produce waste can either assume care of waste recovery or recycling themselves, or have their waste recovered and/or recycled by specialist companies. Given the growing market for waste recovery, several such 'specialist' companies have appeared, but with many of them operating in a dishonest capacity. Some of the more disreputable firms perform waste recovery and/or recycling activities 'on paper' only, while others have offered their services for rock-bottom prices without taking into consideration the total costs involved in the adequate performance of services. This has resulted in waste being barely processed, or in not being processed at all. Naturally, this dynamic has served to undermine the quality of service and to reduce waste recovery and recycling in Poland to unacceptably low levels.
The number of 'specialised' waste recovery firms now in Poland will likely shrink from about 40 to 10 at the most, which is actually quite a few compared to the Czech Republic or Germany, where there are one and three such companies respectively.
Poland-based companies involved in businesses that produce packaging waste need to pay a product-fee and to ensure that a fixed percentage of create waste created will be recycled. Some of these firms — and the number will in all probability grow — are outsourcing recycling activities to specialist firms.
Krzysztof Kawczynski heads one of Poland's largest recovery and recycling firms, Polski System Recyklingu (PSR), which processes some 185,000 tonnes of packaging waste annually. Kawczynski believes that Poland's approach at the onset of a market-based economy in the late 1990s was much too liberal.
"Anyone [at that time] could set up a recovery and recycling business, regardless of actual plans or potential for, say, investment in selective collection of waste," says Kawczynski. "This had a great deal of negative impact, like non-credible firms performing collection and recycling on paper only, or offering dumping prices that never took actual waste management costs into account, and so on."
