The Circular Economy Package of the European Union

Abstract

The Circular Economy Package which the European Commission pre-sented on 2 December 2015 aims to stimulate Europe's transition towards a circular economy, improve international competitiveness, foster sustainable economic growth and generate new jobs. The package fleshes out the EU Roadmap to a Resource-efficient Europe where it relates to the circular economy. The package comprises legislative proposals on waste and an action plan (Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, Closing the loop – An EU action plan for the Cirular Economy, COM(2015) 614 final). The legislative proposals on waste aim to expand recycling and reduce land filling, and the action plan for the circular economy contains proposals for " closing the loop " in the circular economy and including all phases of a product's lifecycle, from manufacture and use to waste management and the market for secondary raw materials. The revised legislative proposal on waste, which encompasses amendments to four legal acts, sets waste reduction targets and is meant to create a long-term frame-work for waste management and recycling. To ensure effective implementation, the waste reduction targets in the new proposal are accompanied by various measures. However, the level of ambition of the measures included in the action plan offers countries with highly developed waste management systems such as Germany, the Netherlands, Austria or Denmark little new incentive, whereas they are ambitious for other Member States. The growing level of global consumption requires us to rethink how we deal with natural resources. A circular economy – one which fully integrates all aspects rang-ing from product design, sustainable production methods and patterns of consump-tion to recycling – makes significant contributions to resource conservation. Economic development in Germany has long been characterised by rising industrial production and an expanding service industry. Greater pressures on the environment have naturally accompanied this development. It has been possible to reduce or contain these environmental effects in many sectors, as environmental technology has become more advanced, and because organisations have contributed to protecting the environment within their companies and have become more effi-cient at dealing with energy and raw materials. On a macroeconomic scale, many of the climate protection gains made in Germany have been reversed or even eclipsed because both the volume and variety of goods produced has risen simultaneously, and manufacturing has increasingly been transferred abroad. Electric devices are a good example – although each indi-vidual device has become significantly more efficient, many more devices are sold overall. This results in efficiency gains being neutralised or drowned out by the number of devices sold. If we assume that more than 9 billion people will adopt the manufacturing and consumption patterns of the industrialised world in the future, the international con-sequences for nature and the environment would be catastrophic.