The Waste Management Act, 1996, consistently with EU legislation, classifies as a recovery activity the use of waste principally as a fuel or other means to generate energy.
A recent EU Council Resolution on the review of the Community Waste Management Strategy emphasises the need for promoting waste recovery, in particular by re-use, recycling, composting and recovering energy from waste. The resolution recognises, as regards recovery operations, that the choice of option in any particular case must have regard to environmental and economic effects. It considers that at present, until scientific and technological progress is made and life-cycle analyses are further developed, reuse and material recovery should be considered preferable where and in so far as they are the best environmental options.