The European Parliament’s Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE), led by Italian Socialist MEP Patrizia Toia, yesterday voted to accept changes to the new EU Packaging Regulation that would strip out many of the remaining innovative aspects of the rules. It is a cruel irony that the EU Parliamentary committee responsible for innovation, yesterday retrograded a new law away from innovation and back towards business as usual.
The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation was advanced by the European Commission. It included ambitious targets on adopting reusable packaging within functioning reuse systems, to curb the increasing production of single-use packaging and related waste. Leaks of early versions of the draft Regulation revealed the impact of intensive industrial lobbying; the reuse targets even in the first public draft were significantly less ambitious than the targets in the earlier, leaked drafts. But this wasn’t enough for the lobbyists. Yesterday’s ITRE vote includes changes to the law that would essentially scrap all meaningful targets towards reusable packaging, reduce recycling targets, and in some cases put recycling and reuse in opposition – allowing one to be used as an excuse to avoid the other.
The fact is that a single business segment, producing throw-away paper packaging, has managed to hijack the whole political discourse, blocking measures designed to reduce packaging and instead profiting from the plastics crisis by instead ramping up use of paper-based packaging. Paper packaging is now leading the rise in demand for pulp & paper. Around 3 billion trees are cut down every year to produce throw-away packaging. Water resources are depleted, indigenous and local communities rights are violated, just to expand the tree plantations needed to produce so much garbage.
Consumption of graphic paper in Europe has dropped by more than a third thanks to digitalisation. But the savings here have been wiped out because of the dramatic rise in unnecessary paper packaging. Reusable packaging is not new; human societies have been using it, and reusing it, for centuries. The EU Packaging Regulation should be a unique chance to stop the nonsense of throwaway-first thinking.
The new packaging regulation should be making space for new kinds of packaging systems that don’t rely on relentless use of raw materials, systems that move towards genuine circular packaging.
Business as usual single-use packaging exerts a cost on the climate, on forests, on indigenous and other forest people, and on the liveability of this planet. The cost is too high. The European Union should act immediately, to avoid being held hostage by a small but powerful segment of an industrial lobby.
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