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Following this announcement, the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) has called on the EC and Member States to dismiss the standards because they encourage industry to increase packaging volumes rather than supporting recyclability, innovation and waste efficiency and minimisation.
“The Commission has failed to ensure sufficient quality and discredited the idea of delegating technical aspects of environmental policies to standardisation,” said EEB member and chair of the European Environmental Citizen’s Organisation for Standardisation (ECOS).
“Instead of creating an ambitious and enforceable level playing field for Europe’s industry, Member States are now forced to develop piecemeal solution to meet their legal requirements.”
The standards, developed by the industry-dominated European Committee for Standardisation (CEN), are the second attempt to elaborate useful standards to enable enforcement agencies to steer the packaging industry towards using more recyclable and reusable packaging.
According to the EEB, however, they will fail because the standards allow:
EEB waste policy officer Melissa Shinn said that, by publishing these standards, the Commission had failed to do its job as a regulator and ensure that the packaging directive provided the right enforcement tools that are not violating the objectives of the packaging waste directive.
“The ten year experiment on using the private standardisation bodies to set environmental requirements has failed,” she stated. “The Commission needs to admit that and revise its approach and the packaging directive as soon as possible.”
By Jane Kettle
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