Throwing away the throwaway society

5 takeaways from the European Commission's Circular Economy Action Plan.

The European Commission unveiled its Circular Economy Action Plan | Georges Gobet/AFP via Getty Images

Brussels wants people to buy fewer clothes, fix and not ditch smartphones and recycle instead of dumping things in the trash — all part of an effort to slash resource use.

The European Commission on Wednesday unveiled its Circular Economy Action Plan — tackling everything from clamping down on waste to mandating a greater use of recycled materials in new products, and hammering home the principles of reduce, reuse and recycle.

It’s part of a broader environmental shift by the Commission that includes the Green Deal and Industrial Strategy and aims to make the bloc climate neutral by 2050.

The idea is to lessen humanity’s impact on the planet — an effort that’s driven by rising public disquiet over everything from climate change to masses of plastic trash in the oceans.

“We only have one Planet Earth, and yet by 2050 we will be consuming as if we had three,” said Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius.

The real battles are still to come as the Commission will gradually roll out the 35 pieces of legislation outlined in the plan’s annex over the next three years.

Here are five takeaways:

1. The idea is to change everything

The document wants bans on the destruction of unsold goods and built-in obsolescence — the term for companies making products designed to eventually stop working and then be replaced. It also includes an EU strategy to clean up textile production and regulatory measures that would require electronics manufacturers to make products like mobile phones, tablets and earphones easier to repair and recycle.

The goal is to scrap the traditional pattern of take-make-use-dispose by getting manufacturers to rethink how they design products — which means making it easier to repair and recycle.

The Commission wants to create new ecolabels and have companies clearly display information about the environmental footprint of their products.

But having more sustainable products won’t be enough to make the economy more circular. The Commission also needs people to change their consumption habits, and maybe feel a little guiltier about wasteful behavior.

“It’s not just about reusing, recycling, it’s also about creating a new relationship with the products we have,” Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans said Friday during the launch of the European Plastics Pact — a voluntary agreement among governments and companies to cut plastic waste. “They need to live longer … to be fully recyclable, they need to be repairable.”

The plan also wants companies to develop new business models based on product-as-service. “Instead of buying a washing machine, you buy the service of washing,” Timmermans said, adding that by doing so “you take the incentive away to not make the machine durable so that you can sell another machine three or four years down the line.”

To protect consumers against fake environmental claims — known as greenwashing — and to raise awareness, the Commission also wants to create new ecolabels and have companies clearly display information about the environmental footprint of their products.

2. Tech is under special scrutiny

The Commission is tired of the tech sector introducing new chargers every few years, so it will demand that all manufacturers use a common charger.

“We see a situation now [in which] Samsung came last year with a new charger, and the same happened with Apple who changed their USB port … so we definitely need to seek for the universal one,” Sinkevičius said ahead of the launch.

He acknowledged that such a change cannot happen overnight as that would only create more waste. “There has to be a smart timing when it can be introduced, of course the producers will also need their time to adjust, but we definitely need to have [a] set date legislation when we’re moving to reach it,” the commissioner said.

3. It goes soft on fashion

The plan includes an EU Strategy for Textiles — to be proposed in 2021 — that will take a carrot rather than stick approach to cleaning up the fashion industry. It will be focused on research and ecodesign measures, as well as helping people get better access to re-use and repair services, instead of mandating tough targets.

“We’re not going to set the goal of how much textiles are going to be recycled or reused,” said Sinkevičius.

That careful approach isn’t as demanding as steps being taken by France — the heartland of haute couture. Paris is proposing its own circular economy plan that would create a new extended producers responsibility scheme for the textile industry, a ban on destroying unsold items and a voluntary ecolabel on clothes.

French Environment Minister Brune Poirson said last month she wants to push binding measures at the EU level: “I cannot make [the ecolabel on clothes] mandatory [in France] for the moment because I need to wait that Europe makes it mandatory.”

4. Money, money, money

To completely revamp the bloc’s economy to a more circular model, the Commission wants to steer investments by developing an EU ecolabel for financial products.

The Commission already started in 2018 developing criteria for sustainable financial products.

Other financial tools include encouraging the broad application of environmental taxation, including landfill and incineration taxes, as well as using VAT rates to promote the circular economy.

5. Upcoming battles

Unlike some of the Commission’s other grandiose ideas, the circular economy plan has strong public backing and there isn’t a unified bloc of member countries opposed to the idea. That doesn’t mean everyone is on board.

Czech Deputy Minister Vladislav Smrž said during the Environment Council last week that the previous Circular Economy Action Plan from 2015 and the Single-Use Plastics Directive already set “quite extensive” targets for waste and packaging — most of which have not yet been implemented in national legislation.

Environmental organizations largely welcomed the proposals, but there were some grumbles.

“We don’t feel it’s appropriate to announce new targets for packaging and waste as the other [targets] should first be implemented,” he said.

Sinkevičius fired back that there’s been “plenty of time” for countries to implement the new rules. “Some member states managed to implement EU legislation, others unfortunately struggled,” he said. “But we need to step up implementation, [because] we have very little space for maneuver to reach climate neutrality by 2050.”

There isn’t strong resistance from business. Nicholas Hodac, director general of UNESDA Soft Drinks Europe, said his sector “is ready to accelerate our investments in collection, recycling and recycled content in order to make circularity a reality.”

Environmental organizations largely welcomed the proposals, but there were some grumbles.

Stéphane Arditi, policy manager at the European Environment Bureau, said he regretted that the Commission failed to commit to halving the EU’s material footprint by 2030.

Meadhbh Bolger, campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, was more critical and said that the “plan for a circular economy is out of touch with the reality and urgency of the planetary emergency. It will fail to reduce resource consumption … because it is written to satisfy the demands of endless economic growth, over the needs of people and the natural world.”

Asked why the Commission didn’t commit to a target to reduce resource consumption, Sinkevičius told POLITICO that “as the environment commissioner, of course, I have a very clear position that it’s necessary, but we also have to be realistic with [the] implementation.”

“The main goal of the Circular Economy Action Plan is mainstreaming circularity and decoupling it from resources extraction — if we will be able to prove that we achieve growth without extracting more resources than I think we can talk about other goals.”

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