The acute shortage of raw materials provided by Mother Nature has prompted a wake-up call in Europe in the form of the EU Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe. Dutch politicians are ready to take up this European initiative.
Read moreDouble interview with politicians Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy and Marieke van der Werf
‘Resource efficiency and waste management go hand in hand’
The acute shortage of raw materials provided by Mother Nature has prompted a wake-up call in Europe in the form of the EU Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe. Dutch politicians are ready to take up this European initiative.
By Pieter van den Brand
Among often heard concepts such as ‘cradle to cradle’, ‘the circular economy’ and the ‘materials roundabout’, the next container term for the sustainable use of resources and materials recovery has made its entry: resource efficiency. The term was officially served up by the Brussels policy kitchen at the end of September, when Janez Potočnik published his Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe. The environment commissioner wants to tackle the urgent problem of raw materials scarcity. He argues that the idea that more economic growth will automatically countenance greater consumption of natural resources is no longer tenable. The transition to a low carbon, ‘green’ economy necessitates a sparing use of resources.
In mid October the multimedia savvy Europolitician twittered avidly about the start of the campaign: ‘Generation Awake. Your choices make a world of difference!’ wrote Potočnik to get his message over to European citizens. The ‘Generation Awake’ video clip, with its guitar-strumming, singing shopping bags, was available not only on the multilingual site, but also on YouTube. ‘...Think of the planet when you buy. Make sure the impact is not too high. Stay awake when you buy buy baby.’ MEP Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy (ALDE Group) has seen the newly launched video. ‘A fun video. Great for making people aware of their ability to make a difference in their daily choices. It also makes a good contribution to a less wasteful society. But the campaign is not enough to make the major steps forward that are needed. It is industrial production more than anything that has to be more efficient and sustainable,’ he says from Strasburg, where the European Parliament is sitting this week. He is full of praise for Potočnik’s Roadmap: ‘It is an excellent document with a solid evidence base. Potočnik has had to put in a lot of work to get the Roadmap approved by the College of Commissioners. His colleagues anticipate all sorts of problems, and many battles will have to be fought along the way. Moreover, many European politicians remain unconvinced of the economic necessity, although this is clearly evident. The prices of raw materials are rising, which is reason enough to use our natural resources sparingly.’
No time to lose
Gerbrandy is the European Parliament rapporteur for the Roadmap, which puts him in a position to steer the legislative process through Parliament. ‘What I really want to do is speed up the process. There is no time to lose.’ In the Roadmap, Potočnik proposes developing indicators the EU member states can use to measure the quality of their resource efficiency. ‘This is an essential requirement for setting quantifiable targets,’ says Gerbrandy. ‘It is a tricky aspect, because the Roadmap is not only about materials, but also about food, water, clean air, soil and biodiversity. Luckily, good indicators have already been drawn up in other guidance documents.’
The new European policy vision will eventually be translated into legislation, which will then have to be transposed into national legislation and regulations. The critics predict that implementing the Roadmap will not be easy and point to the experience so far with the three-year-old Waste Framework Directive. A survey by the European Federation of Waste Management and Environmental Services (FEAD) shows that this directive has been fully implemented in just one member state in Eastern Europe. Local authorities in those member states disregard the waste hierarchy prescribed by the Waste Framework Directive. Too often landfill is preferred to incineration and recycling. The EU will have to steer with a firm hand to reduce the landfilling of recyclable and reusable materials in favour of materials recycling and energy recovery, concluded FEAD. The implementation of the Roadmap faces a similar challenge, acknowledges Gerbrandy, but he is not pessimistic. ‘Recycling raw materials will become increasingly economic. These countries will also realise that they will soon have to establish a well-equipped recycling infrastructure. The rising raw materials prices will definitely spur this development on. Europe would do well to make haste because other countries, such as Japan and Brazil, have already made considerable progress. As a major importer of raw materials, Europe cannot afford to lag behind.’
Waste policy
Resource efficiency is something that Dutch MP Marieke van der Werf (CDA) wants to see incorporated into Dutch policy as soon as possible. ‘Resource efficiency means making judicious use of raw materials and not depleting the stocks of natural resources, which currently continues unabated. Economy is not the right response to scarcity. Buying time is not a structural solution. We need to pursue other options, such as using alternative, biobased materials – although we must be mindful that these alternatives do not displace food production.’ Van der Werf thinks the Roadmap largely neglects the reuse of materials and smart product design. ‘We must ensure that products are easy to dismantle at the end of their useful lives and that materials can be used again more easily. This will bring us closer to the circular economy.’ She also makes the case for investigating how much of the eighty per cent of waste that is now recycled is put to high grade uses. ‘We need to know this if we are to recycle materials for higher grade uses and recover materials more efficiently.’
Imposing a levy on primary plastics to make them more expensive and encourage recycling is not a good idea, she says. ‘Neither is it necessary. The prices of recovered materials will rise anyway. Moreover, you cannot stimulate recycling with a sustainable procurement policy.’ She feels the Netherlands can play a key role in putting the Roadmap’s ambitions into practice. ‘Ecodesign has strong roots in the Netherlands. We have much expertise in this area as well as a well-developed waste sector with considerable flair for export. As far as I am concerned, the waste industry should be one of our top industrial sectors.’
Gerbrandy also sees the connections with waste policy. ‘Resource efficiency and waste management go hand in hand. Waste is no longer a problematic material we have to get rid of. The new way of looking at waste is to see it as something we badly need, which is reason enough not to immediately define it as waste, but to clearly label it as a raw material. Of course, we must also not lose sight of the fact that some waste is fundamentally hazardous. However, how we value waste will certainly undergo an about turn. For example, local authorities now have to pay to have their waste removed. In future, this situation could be reversed. A day will come when the waste industry will pay local authorities for the raw materials they have collected. That day is sooner than we think.’
Vision DWMA
The DWMA is convinced that waste companies will play an essential role in fulfilling the vision set out in the Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe. To create a European climate for resource efficiency it is essential to stop landfilling recyclable and recoverable waste. The European institutions have to regulate this final piece of the puzzle within the existing legislative framework.
In the very near future the European waste sector will become a major supplier of raw materials, greatly benefiting the climate, the environment and the economy (by reducing the pressure on scarce resources) in the process. Various studies show that modern waste management can make a significant contribution to meeting the EU’s 2020 targets (a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions and 20% more renewable energy) by avoiding many CO2 emissions.
Although the EU Waste Framework Directive contains incentives to member states to modernise their waste management systems, other measures are important too. We propose a number of main actions:
1. Enforce implementation of EU waste legislation
2. Promote waste as a resource
3. Review the 10-year-old Landfill Directive
4. Stimulate green public procurement
5. Revise the Ecodesign Directive
6. Link EU funding to materials management
7. Harmonise recycling targets
8. Support innovation and knowledge
1. Implement EU waste legislation
We encourage the European institutions to work with the member states and the waste sector to take concrete steps to boost the implementation and enforcement of EU waste legislation. Too many member states have a poor track record on this matter. A stick and carrot approach is needed to improve their performance.
2. Waste is a resource
Recycling wastes as raw materials is a valuable way of conserving scarce resources and cutting back on the use of primary raw materials. The landfilling of recoverable wastes could be prevented by introducing European minimum standards, within the existing EU waste framework, that prescribe minimum treatment methods for specific wastes. As an example, in the Netherlands the minimum standard for combustible waste is energy recovery and the minimum standard for source separated waste is recycling.
3. Landfill Directive
The Landfill Directive is now 10 years old and must be revised to introduce emission factors, update the best available techniques and prevent scarce resources and materials from going to landfill.
4. Green public procurement
The public sector in Europe is the largest procurer of goods and services and can therefore become the launching customer for sustainable (resource efficient) goods and services. The EU could propose a package to stimulate national governments to lead by example through legislation and funding.
5. Ecodesign Directive
This directive is due for revision in 2012. The economic and environmental necessity of broadening the scope of this directive to include product requirements on recyclability, resource efficiency and percentage usage of secondary raw materials is increasing every day.
6. EU funding
EU funding must be geared more to bringing about the shift towards the recycling society by linking it to the prioritised waste hierarchy.
7. Harmonise recycling targets
Under article 11 of the Waste Framework Directive, the member states have four different options for meeting and calculating the recycling targets. This does not actively facilitate the shift to a real recycling society or deliver the desired transparency, and results in relatively poor statistics on waste at EU level. The targets in article 11 have to be harmonised.
8. Innovation and knowledge
DWMA support the ideas of the EC on the development of an Innovation Partnership on Raw Materials. Furthermore, national knowledge institutes like the Dutch Knowledge Platform for Sustainable Resource Management should be given EU support to form a broader EU-wide network. The EU could also contribute to the resilience of companies by developing open source LCA tools to help all companies to become more resource efficient.
