On Wednesday 18 April, with its final vote on review of the EU waste directives, the European Parliament in Strasbourg opened the road to adoption by the Council of a key element in the 2015 EU action plan to promote the transition to a circular economy, in the interest of the environment, public health, the saving of resources, and employment.
With an overwhelming majority, Parliament endorsed the provisional institutional agreement reached on 18 December 2017 on review of four directives aimed mainly at fixing ambitious, binding objectives for re-use and recycling and for reducing landfill activity (see EUROPE 11928).
Simona Bonafé of Italy underlined: “This package also contains important measures on waste management, but at the same time goes further by defining rules taking into account the entire life cycle of a product and aims to change the behaviour of businesses and consumers”.
There will be an obligation to recycle at least 55% of municipal waste (from households and businesses) by 2025. The target will be 60% by 2030 and 65% by 2035.
Sixty-five percent of packaging waste should be recycled by 2025, and 70% by 2030, with specific objectives for each material (plastic, wood, ferrous metals, aluminium, glass, paper and cardboard).
Landfill will also be limited to 10% maximum of all municipal waste by 2035. The challenge is considerable as, in the EU, nearly one quarter of household waste is still sent to landfill and less than half is recycled or composted.
Textiles and hazardous waste from households should be collected separately by 2025. By 2024, biodegradable waste should also be collected separately or recycled at home through composting.
Member states should endeavour to reduce food waste by 30% by 2025 and by 50% by 2030. They should provide incentives for the collection of unsold food products and their safe redistribution and heighten consumers’ awareness of the meaning of “use by” and “best before” dates.
The text imposes stricter methods of calculation and stricter rules for measuring progress made towards attaining these objectives, as well as stricter demands for separate waste collection. In addition, it strengthens the hierarchy of waste processing options through economic instruments and measures aimed at preventing waste generation, and fixed minimum requirements for greater producer accountability.
According to the vice-president of the Commission responsible for the sustainable development pole, Frans Timmermans, review “will allow the quantity of waste to be reduced, to valorise it and to give fresh impetus to waste processing with, to boot, the creation of jobs and the reduction of our dependence on imports of rare materials”.
In trialogue talks, the Parliament played a key role when it comes to producer responsibility and the management of bio-waste. Also, it advocated more stringent harmonisation of the method for calculating recycling. “The Commission will examine the possibility and the feasibility of going further. We will support the possibility of modulating producer fees when it is a matter of encouraging the circular economy”, Timmermans said during the debate which preceded the vote on Tuesday 17 April. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)