Speaking yesterday at the “Advancing the Packaging Waste Debate Conference”, held in Brussels, Julian Carroll, managing director of Europen, said that a fundamental re-think of how packaging is viewed is needed to meet the packaging and packaging waste directive.
Mr Carroll said that although the directive has promoted higher levels of recycling we now need to address the broader environmental objective of sustainability and not to only think of packaging as a waste issue. “EU packaging legislation should no longer concentrate solely on packaging waste minimisation. Maintaining such a narrow policy focus will not, in the long-run, best serve the goals of the directive.”
Mr Carroll instead called for the waste management elements of future policy to address wider objectives than simply how much packaging can be reused, recovered and recycled.
The conference, organised by the Association of European Steel for Packaging Producers, was held during the European Commission’s Green Week. It examined the packaging directive and looked at the effectiveness of tools including life-cycle analysis (LCA) for decision-making policy in the packaging sector.
LCA is controversial and packaging industry groups have complained about Danish measures to triple eco-taxes on metal cans. They maintain that the data used to compare the “environmental friendliness” of materials is outdated and inaccurate. APEAL made a formal complaint to the European Commission saying that the new law could exclude steel packaging from the Danish market, in breach of the 1994 directive, and that LCAs should not be used to set policy.
These problems arise partly because of the way the directive has been implemented in different countries and by variations in definitions and quality of data. Member states often have different concepts of “packaging” and “recycling” and the Association for the Sustainable Use and Recovery of Resources in Europe has calculated that there is a margin of error of between 20 and 50 per cent in the collection and dissimilation of data.
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