A group of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is calling on the European Commission (EC) to consider implementing 10 specific actions when it reviews its waste targets next month.

The steps – set out by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), Seas at Risk, Zero Waste Europe, RREUSE, Greenpeace, Ecos, the Surfrider Foundation Europe and Friends of the Earth Europe – have been released in a statement ‘Bring Waste Full Circle: How to Implement the Circular Economy’. The move comes ahead of the EC’s review on European Waste Management Targets (a consultation for which was launched last year), thought to be scheduled for June 2014.

The review is being undertaken by the Directorate-General for the Environment at the EC in the hopes of ‘identifying the issues and proposing possible solutions to the targets in the Waste Framework Directive, the Landfill Directive and the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive’.

It aims to reassess clauses in the directives and bring these in line with the EC’s ambition of promoting resource efficiency as detailed in the Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe and the 7th Environmental Action Programme.

In a bid to ‘make waste policy more resource-efficient’, the group of NGOs is calling on the EC to ‘use a broad mix of legal and economic instruments as part of an ambitious package when it proposes its review of waste policy’.

Recommended actions

Specifically, the group is calling for the EC to adopt the following 10 steps:

1. set a binding EU material reduction target based on the Total Material Consumption indicator;
2. implement a zero residual waste target by 2025;
3. introduce binding waste prevention targets for municipal, commercial and industrial waste at European and national levels;
4. introduce preparation for reuse targets (not to be combined with recycling) for municipal solid waste and packaging (with targets for, ‘at a minimum’, textiles and furniture, based on the weight of material per capita put back on the market by approved reuse centres);
5. increase recycling targets to ‘at least’ 70 per cent of municipal solid waste, using ‘only one harmonised methodology for all member states to report on, based on the recycling output’ and implement an overall packaging recycling target of 80 per cent and boost plastic packaging recycling to at least 75 per cent;
6. set a binding quantitative marine litter reduction target of 50 per cent (with an ‘explicit definition of litter included in waste legislation, in recognition of the serious negative impacts on the marine environment’);
7. introduce obligatory separate collection of waste by 2020, in particular for biowaste from homes and the hospitality sector, as well as separate collection for materials including paper, cardboard, metals and textiles;
8. promote economic instruments that support the full implementation of the waste hierarchy, such as extended producer responsibility, pay-as-you-throw schemes and the taxation of resources (where appropriate);
9. aim to design out single-use, non-recyclable products and toxic materials (such as microplastics and oxo-fragmentable plastics); and
10. ban landfill and incineration by 2020 for all recyclable and compostable waste, and ban the financing of incinerators and landfills via structural and cohesion funds.

Benefits of circular economy are ‘too big to ignore’

Speaking of the recommendations, Ariadna Rodrigo, Resource Use Campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, said: “The European Commission's highly anticipated circular economy package needs to provide solutions. [The signatories to the recommendations] are united in calling for a strong legislative waste framework, which provides the right incentives to both governments and companies so that Europe can transform the way it uses resources.

“The benefits are too big to ignore – from protecting the environment from litter, preventing further extraction of resources, making the economy less dependent on the availability of cheap materials, increasing resilience to price fluctuations, and creating up to 860,000 jobs in Europe, especially needed in some countries with unemployment rates as high as 25 per cent.

“In these economically challenging times, nobody doubts the benefits that a true circular economy could bring to Europe.”

Piotr Barczak, Policy Officer for Waste at the EEB, added: “The review of waste policy is an opportunity to set Europe on a path towards resource efficiency. The EU depends on imports for most of its valuable materials, yet many of these end up in landfills and incinerators. This is not just a missed opportunity, it is pure folly…

“But the real way to fight waste is not to generate so much of it in the first place. And that can only happen if the EU is ambitious enough in its review of waste policy and includes stringent prevention, reuse and recycling targets.”

The calls follow the release of a recent EEB study that showed adopting an ‘ambitious’ scenario in this revision could lead to substantial economic and environmental benefits, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions by over 415 million tonnes and helping to employ 860,000 people, or one in every six young Europeans who are currently jobless.

Industry reaction to waste review

The Resource Association, which represents the UK’s reprocessing sector, is also advocating a more ‘ambitious’ approach to target setting in the EU, alongside an ‘urgent’ need to standardise the use of data and definitions across the continent.

However, waste management sector trade body the Environmental Services Association (ESA) has said it does not support standardising higher waste targets, due to the disparities in recycling rates across EU member states.

Like the ESA, the UK government has also said it would not support the introduction of new EU waste targets, or extending current targets, as they ‘would be unlikely to improve the current system and could result in perverse or unintended outcomes’.

Writing in its response to the consultation, the UK government said the following changes proposed in the consultation could ‘result in perverse or unintended outcomes’:

• changing the targets or definitions for 2020 set out in the Waste Framework Directive;
• implementing new environmental targets; and
• extending landfill bans or restrictions for specific materials at an EU level, ‘unless there is a clear economic and environmental case to do so’.

Read ‘Bring Waste Full Circle: How to Implement the Circular Economy’ or find out more about the EEB’s ‘Advancing Resource Efficiency in Europe’.