Summary:

After World War II ended in Poland, large amounts of contamination began entering the environment. This was both household and municipal pollution. Equipment to reduce the released waste was lacking; control services were under-equipped and society, which was facing many different problems, was not interested in environmental protection.
The first issues of national environmental policy were regulated in 1991. In the following years modifications concerning current needs and regulations of the European Union were carried out. According to these regulations, waste man-agement was acknowledged as a separate branch of environmental protection with its most important principles as follows: waste prevention, limiting of waste which could not be prevented, recycling of substances and materials which come from waste and safe neutralization of waste. By virtue of the waste act in 2001, a requirement to start waste planning was introduced at each level of local gov-ernment. These plans were to include analysis of the current state and forecasts of change in waste management, they were also supposed to present actions necessary to meet the targets.
The purpose of this paper was to describe current work principles and methods of waste management planning in addition to new organizational solutions for managing municipal waste. An effectiveness assessment was carried out to evaluate previous solutions and task implementation.
The analysis demonstrated some shortcomings and delays in the introduc-tion of modifications devised to improve the process of managing municipal waste. The biggest backlog was found in investment. Due to high costs, the implementation of some of it did not even start. The introduction of "waste tax" may improve the situation, especially at community level, where citizens have had many respon-sibilities and no chance to get new sources of funding. Cancelling the obligation of waste management planning at community and county level may also turn out to be a favorable change as community and county responsibilities overlapped partly and the administration division did not always respond to local prospects and needs. Introducing waste management regions in their place may improve community activities. Many communities have already taken similar action, forming associations which organize and finance common waste management.