Brussels, 11 October 2018 – Yesterday the European Parliament’s Environment Committee voted on single-use plastics. EUROPEN supports policy objectives that address the problem of plastic pollution and reiterates the packaging supply chain’s active work to further improve the circularity of all packaging, including plastics. We welcome MEPs’ efforts to improve the proposal’s coherence with other EU rules on waste and packaging and to ensure that the Internal Market is safeguarded. It also remains important to ensure that businesses have sufficient development time from R&D to commercialisation. EUROPEN will continue to contribute to ensure that the Directive stimulates meaningful innovations and investments and addresses packaging holistically from a lifecycle perspective. The packaging supply chain has invested substantially in increasing separate collection, sorting and recycling of packaging waste, which helps circularity and avoids loss of valuable resources to waste and littering. The packaging supply chain is also engaged in empowering consumers by contributing financially towards awarenessraising campaigns, and is investing in packaging, material and processing innovations that further support the transition to a Circular Economy. These actions demonstrate that the packaging supply chain is fulfilling its role and responsibility as producers. For instance, a significant number of EUROPEN members have launched their corporate voluntary commitments on recycled content and beyond, as part of the EU Pledging exercise aimed at achieving 10 million tonnes of recycled plastic by 2025. These public corporate commitments help facilitate the framework conditions (e.g. availability at competitive prices and quality of secondary raw materials with functionality criteria to ensure food safety) that need to be in place before mandatory rules on recycled content for plastics can be considered. In addition, we maintain that the EPR minimum requirements in the Waste Framework Directive should remain the sole, appropriate legal text to address producers’ financial contributions, in line with nationally-defined roles and responsibilities of all actors involved. Likewise, to ensure legal clarity and policy coherence, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive, including its ‘Essential Requirements’, should remain the sole appropriate legislation governing marking and design requirements.
