Unlike other some EU-countries, Sweden lacks comprehensive End-of-Waste criteria for C&D waste or even reclaimed aggregates and soil. Except for scrap aluminium, scrap iron and glass culls, previously developed for the whole EU, there are no End-of-waste criteria, EoW, at all. Criteria regarding homogeneity, technical conformity etc. are at least partly under way, but comprehensive environmental criteria – although a framework has been suggested previously, for example in a Nordic context - are not yet developed or published.
At the heart of environmental EoW-criteria lies a risk assessment. The environmental risk assessment method most widely used in Sweden was developed for the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA, "Naturvårdsverket" in Swedish) with start about 20 years ago. Its scope is to calculate acceptable concentrations of potentially hazardous substances in contaminated soil, as well as to enable informed decisions on soil remediation measures. Although the model can be adjusted for site prerequisites, it was neither designed to comprise of other materials than "standard soil", nor was it meant to take into account constraints on hazardous substance in material as a result of recycling activities or construction specifications. Several initiatives have been taken to adjust the risk assessment model to fit recycling of waste for construction purposes in contact with soil, or as a material used in landfill capping (SEPA handbook 2010:1; Bendz et al., 2009; van Praagh et al., 2017 and 2019). In these cases, however, the material is legally still regarded as a waste, and the risk assessment is part of environmental permitting for specific projects, not for the material as such. As of now, it is not clear how precise or how conservative these adjusted risk assessment models are. Model assumptions for construction and demolition phases, for example, have not been verified. This is true for potential impact on “non-standard” soil and microorganisms, too, and even more so for bioavailability of hazardous substances, which in the SEPA model are set to 100%. Additionally, environmental and health risks of the material being moved and repurposed for a different use, together with the likelihood of an unsuitable usage, have not been thoroughly addressed.
There are strong arguments in favour of using the SEPA model as a backbone for developing environmental End-of-Waste criteria, too: It is well known to authorities, has been regularly updated and is widely used in the field of contaminated land.

The question is, however, whether the shortcomings described above merit developing an altogether new model? And which are possible guiding examples from other countries or research areas?