Brussels, 21/12/2010 (Agence Europe) - EU27 environment ministers are calling for a European strategy that guarantees the rational and sustainable management of raw materials whose excessive use is increasing resource scarcity and threatening the environment. The unanimous conclusions adopted in Brussels on Monday 20 December formalise the Council's recommendations on a theme dear to the outgoing Belgian Presidency (see EUROPE 10179), and will also be a useful guide for the European Commission in developing the strategy expected in 2011. Joke Schauvliege was delighted with this breakthrough. “The Council has made a contribution that is dense in content. The concept of sustainable materials management may facilitate the transformation of a resource-efficient Europe as the EUROPE 2020 strategy foresees”, she said.
The Council accepts a broad interpretation to resource efficiency, encompassing all natural resources including energy and non-energy resources, biotic and abiotic materials, water, air, soil, living organisms, ecosystems and biodiversity. The Belgian minister stresses that resource efficiency is not only an economic concept, like increased productivity, but that it also means managing limited resource availability, and decreasing environmental impact resulting from resource use.
In its conclusions on sustainable materials management and sustainable production and consumption - an essential contribution to the efficient use of resources in Europe - the Council fears that the EU's large-scale use of resources and its high dependency on imports of raw materials, together with demographic growth and global economic development, will in future pose a threat to Europe and its access to resources. To counter this risk, the Council recommends an integrated life-cycle-based approach to lower the global impact of organic material flows (such as food), by developing a common methodology on the quantitative assessment of environmental impacts of products throughout their life-cycle. It recommends that the Commission carry out assessment of the directive on eco-design and envisage extending the scope to priority products not linked to energy, but which have a significant environmental impact.
The Council encourages the Commission to continue developing a series of indicators on the use of materials and the impact that their use has with a view to suggesting quantifiable objectives and resource efficiency measures. The Commission is also invited to conceive action to strengthen corporate social responsibility, and notably to promote sustainable supply chain management. The member states and the Commission are urged to step up their effort to make European materials use more sustainable. (A.N./transl.jl)