9th Conference & Exhibition on Waste Management & Recycling - the event that will extend your business in South-East Europe
Organizer: Via Expo
Event Partner: Hungarian Waste Management Federation (HOSZ)
The European Recycling Industries’ Confederation (EuRIC) welcomes the opportunity to comment on the EU initiative “Monitoring Framework for the Circular Economy”. Assessing progress and better understanding are important elements to realise the transition towards a Circular Economy that EuRIC entirely supports. This monitoring framework should focus on true indicators that can objectively assess the progress and avoid any distractions towards monitoring areas very weakly or not related to achieving this transition. EuRIC calls on the European Commission to seize this opportunity to create a monitoring tool which is able to identify the number of shortcomings hindering the transition to a Circular Economy.
ERPA – EuRIC Paper Recycling Branch – is a founding Member of the European Recovered Paper Council (ERPC), created in 2000 at a time where the concept of the circular economy had not yet become a major political and economic objective. It has since the outset supported the very objectives of ERPC and promoted the value chain approach that ERPC embodied. For the first time, EuRIC Paper Recycling Branch decided not to co-sign the new “European Declaration on Paper Recycling” 2016 – 2020.
Innovation and enhanced collection and sorting systems key for closing the loop
The co-signatories have been made aware that the Council of the European Union is considering the inclusion of activities in the provisions to measure recycling targets which either have nothing to do with recycling or result in the production of low quality waste materials. This inclusion, if endorsed, would enable to count as recycled waste materials which are not recycled and hence artificially increase recycling rates. In other words, such rules would enable in practice to cheat on the achievement of recycling targets, encourage poor quality recycling and annihilate the benefits of ambitious recycling rates. From a legal view, they would contradict the waste hierarchy first laid down by European legislation in the original directive 1975/442/EEC of 15 July 1975 on waste.