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EuRIC offers suggestions on roadmap for a new CEAP

31
Jan '20

Pic: EuRIC

The European Recycling Industries’ Confederation (EuRIC) has suggested the European Commission to adapt legislation to circular material flows by modernising certain waste laws, lay down market and fiscal based-instruments to incentivise the use of raw materials from recycling and level the playing field with primary materials for its Roadmap for a New Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP).

It has also recommended putting in place requirements and incentives to design circular products and empower consumers’ sustainable choices through proper labelling.

As the low-hanging fruit have already been picked, it is absolutely essential to drastically change important policy and regulatory-drivers applicable to recycling activities and throughout the value chain, based on the above three priorities, it said in a press release.

These three priorities are essential to develop a much needed European Union (EU) market for secondary raw materials rightly identified in the roadmap as problem to be tackled.

Regarding the need to adapt legislation to material flows and unlock obstacles to an European market for recycling, EuRIC has identified five main priorities: simpler and faster waste shipment procedures, addressing the stark legal dichotomy between ‘waste' and ‘products, materials or substances’, improving the interface between waste and chemicals legislation, striving for a competitive recycling sector in Europe and globally, and pragmatic approach to residual waste treatment capacities.

As 80 per cent of the environmental impact of products is determined at design stage and yet the vast majority of products are designed without any consideration for their end-of-life stage, design for circularity is of paramount importance to move towards a circular economy and needs to be extended to all products’ categories, EuRIC said.

Hence, EuRIC has called for extending eco-design requirements to all product categories as a number of those (like tyres) are not at all covered either by eco-design regulations, including resource efficiency requirements nor by sectorial waste and product legislation (e.g. packaging).

It has called for systematically linking end-of-life treatment requirements and targets set in waste legislation (dismantling and de-pollution requirements, setting up minimum binding requirements to improve products’ recyclability and recycled content on a product by product category, and eco-labelling based on objective criteria to empower consumers’ sustainable choices.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)

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