Carsten Wachholz of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) said it is vital the concept “gets into the DNA of EU policy”.
Writing in The Parliament Magazine, he said that despite its improving recycling rates, Europe must establish product standards and improve resource use information schemes, otherwise the single market and industrial competition will be damaged.
Wachholz stated that “in this field we green groups recommend making better use of existing regulation, not creating new ones”.
The ecodesign directive is cited as “one of the most successful” examples, as it has led to “tremendous improvements in energy efficiency across an array of products”. He urged that the directive should “now explore flexible incentives and rules for manufacturers to deliver both energy and material savings”.
In February 2013, The Recycler reported on a voluntary pledge by a number of OEMs, including Canon, Epson Europe, HP and Lexmark, to reduce their carbon footprint, which the European Commission said was equivalent to the goals of the ecodesign directive.
He offered three ways in which the directive could be put to better effect; firstly, design requirements should ask that products be more repairable and longer lasting; secondly, key product components should be more easily extractable so their critical materials can be reused, remanufactured an recycled; and finally, it should ensure hazardous and problematic substances that might discourage the use of recycled products be removed.
The policy administrator also said manufacturers ought to “provide information about disassembly and repair instructions as well as on end-of-life treatment of their products” to boost movement towards a circular economy. Relevant information could also be given together with the product when the customer receives it.
Downstream users such as repair and re-use centres and recycling companies, Wachholz believes, “could be made easily accessible via a standardised electronic format”.
Two benefits of adapting a circular economy he highlights are keeping products’ “components and materials on the market and in circulation” and providing “an important opportunity to tackle some of the employment challenges that Europe is currently facing”. He concluded that smart implementation of the EU ecodesign should be a “key pillar” of the commission’s new proposal.
WRAP CEO Liz Goodwin wrote [http://www.therecycler.com/posts/wrap-ceo-highlights-circular-economy-benefits/] a piece earlier this week similarly extolling the circular economy and its potential for improving efficiency and saving money for businesses on a global scale.