PROCEDURAL ASPECTS OF THE LICENSING PROCEDURE IN HAZARDOUS WASTE MANAGEMENT IN UKRAINE

Abstract

The article offers a doctrinal understanding of the legal mechanisms for admitting economic entities to hazardous waste management activities in Ukraine through the prism of the interaction between substantive and procedural environmental law and digital administrative tools. The subject of analysis is the provisions of the Law of Ukraine “On Waste Management” and the Law of Ukraine “On Environmental Impact Assessment”, as well as subordinate acts of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine, which regulate the provision of administrative services through the Waste Management Information System (as part of the “EcoSystem”), maintaining registers, and issuing permits and licences. It has been shown that the current permit model is multi-level and consists of a sequence of “environmental impact assessment (hereinafter referred to as EIA) → processing permit → hazardous waste management licence”. It is designed to simultaneously ensure a preventive assessment of environmental impacts (through an environmental impact assessment conclusion), confirmation of the technical suitability of a specific facility (through a processing permit), and the operator’s compliance with system safety standards (through licensing, which involves a preliminary check of the material and technical base). At the same time, a comparison of material requirements and procedural stages reveals significant duplication of control functions: identical parameters of environmental acceptability, technological capability and organisational suitability are checked at three different stages. This leads to an accumulation of deadlines, increased transaction costs for businesses and administrative burdens for authorities, without creating a proportional increase in the level of environmental safety. Particular attention has been paid to the intermediate link of the processing permit, which in fact transforms into a “procedural gateway”, as it re-aggregates the data and conditions already established in the environmental impact assessment conclusion and subsequently re-verified within the licensing process including mandatory verification of the material and technical base. This is the basis for the deregulation decision for hazardous waste: to integrate the content of the processing permit directly into the structure of the licence and the Licence Conditions, while retaining the mandatory requirement for an EIA conclusion and pre-licence inspection of the material and technical base.