EU Commission awarded a “fail” for new packaging standards

Revised versions of five packaging standards – which support the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive – were adopted by the EU at the weekend.

”The 10-year experiment on using the private standardisation bodies to set environmental requirements has failed. The Commission needs to admit that and revise its approach.“
– Melissa Shinn, EEB
Drawn up by EU standards organisation CEN, the standards bring in essential requirements for packaging producers on the manufacturing and composition of materials and their suitability for re-use, recycling, reduction and recovery.

The standards include EN 13427:2004, EN 13428:2004, EN 13429:2004, EN 13430:2004 and EN 13431:2004.

But, packaging companies do not have to demonstrate conformity with the new standards, it has been left for enforcement authorities to prove the companies are not compliant.

Fail
The European Environmental Bureau – an umbrella organisation for European pressure groups including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace – called on the Commission and Member States to dismiss the standards. It said the five standards “fail completely” to achieve their stated environmental goals.

The Bureau said the standards encourage packaging industry to use more non-recyclable materials in their packaging instead of supporting innovation and efficiency through promoting prevention, re-use and the recyclability of waste.

Waste policy officer Melissa Shinn said the new standards was a failure of the “industry-dominated” private sector standardisation body CEN. Ms Shinn said: “The 10-year experiment on using the private standardisation bodies to set environmental requirements has failed. The Commission needs to admit that and revise its approach and the Packaging Directive as soon as possible.”

The Commission “has failed in its job as regulator”, the Bureau said, “despite detailed warning of the inadequacy and dangers of the publication from both the environmental standardisation watchdog – ECOS – and even some Member States”.

Criticisms
Specific criticisms of the standards included that they allow packaging producers to use “voluminous and unnecessary” packaging for the presentation of packaged products. The Bureau slated the standards for classifying “refill pouches” – common in soap powders and similar products – as re-usable packaging, when “the pouch is in fact a one-way throwaway packet and no re-use in the true 'multi-trip' sense occurs”.

The Bureau said the standards allow packaging producers to label their packaging “recyclable” with no minimum level for the amount of recyclable material it actually contains. A further criticism was that the standard for energy recovery allowed packaging producers to use materials with too low an energy content.