Parliament and Council negotiators, assisted by the Commission handed over their work on Monday evening 26 June, in an attempt to push forward the draft revision of the EU “Waste” Directives, a key element in the December 2015 “Circular Economy” package (see EUROPE 11793). Although a little progress had been made, this meeting of trialogue negotiators was inconclusive. The Maltese Presidency will continue to work on this dossier over the next few weeks and it will be up to the Estonian Presidency to continue with it (see other article).
The negotiators mainly debated the framework directive on waste and highlighted the importance of the technical work undertaken on waste treatment hierarchy, food waste, exemptions for feed materials for animals reared on food waste, bi-products, the expiry of the waste status, which all took place after the first trialogue meeting on 30 May.
In a more general way, they were only able to examine three other directives due to the lack of time: the sensitive question of targets (preparations for the reuse of municipal waste, recycling packaging waste, ceilings on landfills) and exemptions.
Next trialogue on 26 September
Parliament submitted a text in an effort to obtain a compromise on the EU waste hierarchy. It would like to include a new annex in the framework directive (annex 4A), which would contain the indicative list of economic instruments that have an incentive value. The Council will analyse this proposal to see whether it can be discussed at the working group but at first glance, it appears that this list, if it is to be envisaged, goes much further than the member states want, according to one diplomatic source speaking to EUROPE on Tuesday 27 June.
The negotiators agreed to come back and provide more detail about the technical aspects of this legislative package in an effort to make progress before the next inter-institutional negotiating meeting planned for 26 September. 4 to 5 technical meetings have now been planned for this purpose, the first on 29-30 June and the following will probably be on 12-13 July. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)