A vote in the European Parliament today saw MEPs back a circular economy resolution by Finnish MEP Sirpa Pietikäinen by 394 votes to 197, with 82 abstentions.
The resolution includes binding recycling targets – a 70% target for municipal solid waste and an 80% target for packaging waste by 2030.
The vote comes after the European Commission scrapped a legislative package put forward by the former Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik which would have updated existing EU waste and landfill diversion laws.
Dr Potocnik’s proposals, which were adopted by the Commission in July 2014, were scrapped by the new Commission in December, which said it favoured a ‘more ambitious set of proposals.
Shift
Commenting on today’s vote Ms Pietikäinen, said: “This is a paradigm shift, a systemic change that we are facing, as well as a huge, hidden, business opportunity. It can be created only by helping a new business ecosystem to emerge.
“But to make this happen, we need legislative, informative, economic and cooperative actions. First, we need a set of indicators and targets. We need a review of existing legislation, as it fails to incorporate the value of ecosystem services.
“We need a broadening of the scope of the ecodesign directive, a renewal of the waste directive, and a special focus on certain areas like sustainable buildings.”
The issue of whether the EU should look to set a higher recycling target is one that has divided opinion within the waste and recycling sector in the UK, which currently looks likely to miss the 50% by 2020 recycling target set out in the existing Waste Framework Directive.
Target
In January the UK government stated that a new circular economy package should allow ‘greater flexibility’ than the one proposed by Dr Potocnik – adding that it did not support any ‘stringent’ new targets unless the economic and environmental benefits exceeded the costs (see letsrecycle.com story).
Campaign group Friends of the Earth has however welcomed the adoption of the resolution.
Ariadna Rodrigo, resource use campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, said: “The Parliament has provided the baseline which the new circular economy package must live up to.
True ‘ambition’ means not just dealing with waste and recycling, but taking concrete steps to address the fundamental problem of resource overconsumption in the EU. The next step must be to set binding resource reduction targets, but measuring what we consume is a strong start.”
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