The European Commission came out on Wednesday with a package of legislative proposals around food waste, biodiversity and the circular economy. Green groups gave it a “C+” for effort.
A revamp of EU waste rules sets binding food waste targets on member countries and would force textile producers to pay for their waste. The Commission’s proposed soil monitoring law would give soil a legal status similar to that of air and water, and aims to ensure that EU soils are healthy by 2050.
The green regulatory bonanza also includes controversial rules on genetically-engineered plants and an overhaul of requirements for the sale and marketing of seeds and other plant propagating material.
But some environmental and industry groups say the proposals miss the mark. The new waste rules’ narrow scope has been a disappointment to green campaigners — as has the soil health revamp and the revision of seed marketing rules.
In an interview, Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius conceded that Brussels could “absolutely” have been more ambitious with the latest instalment of its Green Deal agenda. But, with the clock running down on the executive’s mandate, “the reality is slightly different.”
“We also have to take into consideration timing,” he told POLITICO. “The more complicated proposals are … [the] more time member states … and the Parliament [need] for assessment and so on.”
Other Green Deal rules like the EU nature restoration law and pesticide reduction targets have also been caught up and torn apart in growing pushback from the political right, which is already fighting to win the rural vote ahead of next year’s European election.
“Does this political debate have an impact on our work? Absolutely it does,” said Sinkevičius when pressed on the impact of the political climate on the new proposals. “But the work and the preparation of this proposal started well before the main debate around nature restoration began. Everything can be used in elections in a positive or negative way.”
Excuses, excuses
Critics of the long-awaited package remain unimpressed.
Both NGOs and MEPs have long called on the Commission for greater ambition in the proposals, expressing “disappointment” at the narrow scope of the revised waste rules. The revision of the Waste Framework Directive was initially presented as a revamp of the entire piece of EU legislation — rather than focused solely on textile and food waste.
The proposals follow a damning report by the European Court of Auditors on Monday showing that the EU is lagging far behind in its transition to a circular economy — a cornerstone of its Green Deal hopes.
The report pointed to ineffective funding choices, weaknesses in how the Commission monitors countries’ progress and a lack of focus on “circular design.” The lifespan of clothes decreased by 36 percent over the last 20 years; on average, a garment is worn seven or eight times before it’s no longer used, according to the European Environment Agency.
Theresa Mörsen, waste and resources policy officer at the NGO Zero Waste Europe, welcomed the new rules forcing textile producers to finance the clean-up of the waste they produce as a “good first step” — but argued that without “effective waste prevention measures, we are only treating the symptoms of a broken system.”
Green lawmakers, organic farmers and advocacy groups widely condemned the Commission’s decision to treat some genetically engineered crops as conventional under the “new genomic techniques” rules. Seed conservation networks have also denounced the revised marketing rules as playing into the hands of Big Agri interests to the detriment of small farmers and crop diversity.
The new soil rules, which environmental groups had warned would be watered down before they were unveiled, were renamed at the last minute from the Soil Health Law to the Soil Monitoring Directive. For the European Environmental Bureau, this was another sign of the proposal being weakend.
“The renaming of the ‘Soil Law’ suggests that the focus has shifted to simply monitoring soil health rather than ensuring its improvement,” said Caroline Heinzel of the EEB.
As for food waste, governments will have to reduce waste from restaurants, food services and households by 30 percent per capita and food waste from processing and manufacturing by 10 percent compared to 2020.
While Zero Waste Europe acknowledged that as a “big step toward more sustainable handling of our natural resources,” Mörsen said she “sincerely [hopes] that this target will be strengthened during the negotiations to include a 50 percent reduction by 2030 from farm to fork” — a point echoed by the director general of EuroCommerce, Christel Delberghe.
“Timing is of essence here,” stressed Sinkevičius, “We don’t want to leave these proposals for the next college to be to be to be finalized, for the next Parliament. We want to finish it within this mandate.”