Electronic devices are one of the fastest growing waste streams in the EU, while only 35 percent electronic waste is recycled. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images Brussels’ tech trash troubles Tech is crucial to the Commission’s plans to cut down on waste, but it’s also a source of garbage in its own right.

Brussels is looking at the tech sector as both the savior and destroyer of the planet.

That dichotomy comes through in the European Commission’s new Circular Economy Action Plan, a draft of which was obtained by POLITICO and which will be presented on Wednesday.

On the one hand the plan says that digital technologies can help reduce the environmental impact of other sectors. On the other, it lays out ways to address the growing waste problem of the tech sector itself.

“Digital solutions can advance the circular economy, support the decarbonisation of all sectors and reduce the environmental and social footprint of products placed on the EU market. Yet it is also clear that the ICT sector also needs to undergo its own green transformation,” the Commission said in its digital strategy.

The action plan is aimed at completely revamping the way that the bloc uses resources — tackling everything from clamping down on waste to mandating a greater use of recycled materials in new products, better classifying hazardous waste and hammering home the circular principles of reduce, reuse and recycle.

That’s where the tech sector comes in for special scrutiny. It sells short-lived devices that are difficult to repair and are often replaced. Electronic devices are one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the EU, while only 35 percent electronic waste is recycled.

To reverse that trend, the European Commission wants to require manufacturers of electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablets and earphones to make products more easily repairable and recyclable. The draft plans are still subject to last-minute changes, but give a clear indication of the Commission’s thinking.

To reduce e-waste, the EU’s executive arm is set to consider a bloc-wide reward system for consumers to return or sell back electronic devices.

But at the same time, Brussels is very aware it needs digital technologies in its drive to accelerate the transition to a circular economy.

“Digitalization will offer systemic solutions that will put big data and artificial intelligence at work for environmental policymaking — it will also enable innovative business models such as products-as-service or the sharing economy,” Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius told ministers during Thursday’s Environment Council.

The Commission wants to share the most relevant data on making supply chains more circular — such as the built environment, packaging, textiles, electronics, information and communications technology, and plastics. One of the key elements — to be developed in 2021 — is to set up a data platform to track waste shipments.

The EU’s digital chief Margrethe Vestager and Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton last month presented the bloc’s data strategy. Those plans included a common European Green Deal data space, which would use the “major potential” of data in support of priority actions on climate change, circular economy and zero pollution.

Louise Guillot contributed reporting.

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