지방자치단체와 폐기물처리법제

Local Government and the Legislation On Waste Disposal

In the age of localization, the role of local governments has been emphasized, especially to deal with the waste disposal problem related to the welfare of the residents, which is the purpose of their existence. The local governments should aggressively take the lead. According to the current Local Government Act, the waste disposal work is the responsibility of the local governments. Furthermore, the Waste Management Act stipulates that the chief of the local government has the authority on waste disposal management. Therefore, the local governments are authorized to establish a regulation on the waste management independently and they also have a responsibility to enact the regulation because waste disposal is their duty. But the current ordinances of each local government on the waste management are concentrated on just waste disposal rather than recycling and recycling of resources and most of the ordinances on recycling are just proclamatory and lacking in concreteness. In addition, while maintaining the framework of national laws on waste, they enact meaningless ordinances with no substance. It shows in relations between metropolitan governments’ ordinances and subordinate local governments’ onces. In other words, disregarding the peculiarities of the local governments, metropolitan governments just follow the national law’s frame and the subordinate local governments to follow the metropolitan governments’ ordinance frame. In order to improve the simple and conventional policies on waste disposal towards recycling of resources and ‘Zero Waste’, the local governments should aggressively enact the concrete ordinances on waste management within their legislation power. Furthermore, the local governments should legislate ordinances with their characteristics; free from the frame of national legislation and high-rank local governments, and the most importantly, the local governments should free their mind of the waste “disposal” and reform the ordinances in accordance with the age advocating recycling, resource recycling and “Zero Waste”.