IGPN - International Green Purchasing Network

July 2, 2015

Will the EU propose the most far-reaching reporting standards yet?

Edward Robinson
Thursday 2 July 2015 12.08 BST

One of the European commission’s more controversial decisions under president Jean-Claude Juncker’s Better Regulation initiative was to scrap the European Union’s circular economy package last year.

MEPs and the outgoing environment commissioner Janez Potočnik protested vocally until the new first vice-president of the commission (and regulatory hawk) Frans Timmermans pledged to re-introduce a “more ambitious” circular economy package with a much broader economic scope than the previous one, which had focused mainly on recycling targets.

Four commissioners will be responsible for the new package: Timmermans himself, along with the environment, internal market and competitiveness commissioners. They have launched a public consultation and are expected to publish new legislative proposals by the end of the year.

Lifecycle footprints for every product?
Viewed as the more environmentally active of the EU’s institutions, the European parliament has joint responsibility for crafting the legislation and has got ahead of the game by producing its own report and raft of recommendations on the circular economy – which the whole parliament will vote on next week.

One of the parliament’s most radical proposals is that the EU develop and introduce a “binding lead-indicator and a series of sub-indicators” to measure resource intensity by 2019. These would apply at member-state and industry-level and aim to quantify the lifecycle impact of goods produced in or imported to the EU in every sector. They could well involve individual companies having to account for the footprints of all their products in the way they are required to audit their finances. This is ambitious and will be subject to much lobbying.

Read more at The Guardian.

category : Topics