factors later in this chapter).
As explained in Chapter 15, statistics on waste are particularly unreliable and national estimates of the amount of industrial waste (especially hazardous waste) generated have a wide margin of error. Data on soil and groundwater pollution differ sharply between regions in detail and reliability (see Chapters 5 and 7).
The country groupings used in this chapter are as for Chapter 19: EU, EFTA, Western, Central, former USSR, Central and Eastern Europe see Box 19B.