- A sustainable product policy legislative initiative
- Sustainability principles
- Effective and efficient development and application
- Empowering consumers
- Empowering public buyers
- Enabling circularity in production processes
While up to 80% of products’ environmental impacts are determined at the design phase, the linear pattern of “take-make-use-dispose” does not provide producers with sufficient incentives to make their products more circular. Many products break down too quickly, cannot be easily reused, repaired or recycled, and many are made for single use only. At the same time, the single market provides a critical mass enabling the EU to set global standards in product sustainability and to influence product design and value chain management worldwide.
EU initiatives and legislation already address to a certain extent sustainability aspects of products, either on a mandatory or voluntary basis. Notably, the Ecodesign Directive successfully regulates energy efficiency and some circularity features of energy-related products. At the same time, instruments such as the EU Ecolabel or the EU green public procurement (GPP) criteria are broader in scope but have reduced impact due to the limitations of voluntary approaches. In fact, there is no comprehensive set of requirements to ensure that all products placed on the EU market become increasingly sustainable and stand the test of circularity.
In order to make products fit for a climate-neutral, resource-efficient and circular economy, reduce waste and ensure that the performance of front-runners in sustainability progressively becomes the norm, the Commission will propose a sustainable product policy legislative initiative.
The core of this legislative initiative will be to widen the Ecodesign Directive beyond energy-related products so as to make the Ecodesign framework applicable to the broadest possible range of products and make it deliver on circularity.
As part of this legislative initiative, and, where appropriate, through complementary legislative proposals, the Commission will consider establishing sustainability principles and other appropriate ways to regulate the following aspects:
- improving product durability, reusability, upgradability and reparability, addressing the presence of hazardous chemicals in products, and increasing their energy and resource efficiency;
- increasing recycled content in products, while ensuring their performance and safety;
- enabling remanufacturing and high-quality recycling;
- reducing carbon and environmental footprints;
- restricting single-use and countering premature obsolescence;
- introducing a ban on the destruction of unsold durable goods;
- incentivising product-as-a-service or other models where producers keep the ownership of the product or the responsibility for its performance throughout its lifecycle;
- mobilising the potential of digitalisation of product information, including solutions such as digital passports, tagging and watermarks;
- rewarding products based on their different sustainability performance, including by linking high performance levels to incentives.
Priority will be given to addressing product groups identified in the context of the value chains featuring in this Action Plan, such as electronics, ICT and textiles but also furniture and high impact intermediary products such as steel, cement and chemicals. Further product groups will be identified based on their environmental impact and circularity potential.
The legislative initiative and any other complementary regulatory or voluntary approaches will be developed in a way to improve the coherence with existing instruments regulating products along various phases of their life cycle. It is the intention of the Commission that the product sustainability principles will guide broader policy and legislative developments in the future. The Commission will also increase the effectiveness of the current Ecodesign framework for energy-related products, including by swiftly adopting and implementing a new Ecodesign and Energy Labelling Working Plan 2020-2024 for individual product groups.
The review of the Ecodesign Directive as well as further work on specific product groups, under the Ecodesign framework or in the context of other instruments, will build, where appropriate, on criteria and rules established under the EU Ecolabel Regulation, the Product Environmental Footprint approach and the EU GPP criteria. The Commission will consider the introduction of mandatory requirements to increase the sustainability not only of goods, but also of services. The possibility to introduce requirements linked to environmental and social aspects along the value chain, from production through use to end of life, will also be carefully assessed, including in the context of WTO rules. For instance, ensuring the accessibility of certain products and services next to contributing to social inclusion can have the added benefit of increasing product durability and reusability.
To support the effective and efficient application of the new sustainable product framework, the Commission will:
- establish a common European Dataspace for Smart Circular Applications with data on value chains and product information;
- step up efforts, in cooperation with national authorities, on enforcement of applicable sustainability requirements for products placed on the EU market, in particular through concerted inspections and market surveillance actions.
Empowering consumers and providing them with cost-saving opportunities is a key building block of the sustainable product policy framework. To enhance the participation of consumers in the circular economy, the Commission will propose a revision of EU consumer law to ensure that consumers receive trustworthy and relevant information on products at the point of sale, including on their lifespan and on the availability of repair services, spare parts and repair manuals. The Commission will also consider further strengthening consumer protection against green washing and premature obsolescence, setting minimum requirements for sustainability labels/logos and for information tools.
In addition, the Commission will work towards establishing a new ‘right to repair’ and consider new horizontal material rights for consumers for instance as regards availability of spare parts or access to repair and, in the case of ICT and electronics, to upgrading services. Regarding the role that guarantees can play in providing more circular products, the Commission will explore possible changes also in the context of the review of Directive 2019/771.
The Commission will also propose that companies substantiate their environmental claims using Product and Organisation Environmental Footprint methods. The Commission will test the integration of these methods in the EU Ecolabel and include more systematically durability, recyclability and recycled content in the EU Ecolabel criteria.
Public authorities’ purchasing power represents 14% of EU GDP and can serve as a powerful driver of the demand for sustainable products. To tap into this potential, the Commission will propose minimum mandatory green public procurement (GPP) criteria and targets in sectoral legislation and phase in compulsory reporting to monitor the uptake of Green Public Procurement (GPP) without creating unjustified administrative burden for public buyers. Furthermore, the Commission will continue to support capacity building with guidance, training and dissemination of good practices and encouraging public buyers to take part in a “Public Buyers for Climate and Environment” initiative, which will facilitate exchanges among buyers committed to GPP implementation.
Circularity is an essential part of a wider transformation of industry towards climate-neutrality and long-term competitiveness. It can deliver substantial material savings throughout value chains and production processes, generate extra value and unlock economic opportunities. In synergy with the objectives laid out in the Industrial Strategy, the Commission will enable greater circularity in industry by:
- assessing options for further promoting circularity in industrial processes in the context of the review of the Industrial Emissions Directive, including the integration of circular economy practices in upcoming Best Available Techniques reference documents;
- facilitating industrial symbiosis by developing an industry-led reporting and certification system, and enabling the implementation of industrial symbiosis;
- supporting the sustainable and circular bio-based sector through the implementation of the Bioeconomy Action Plan;
- promoting the use of digital technologies for tracking, tracing and mapping of resources;
- promoting the uptake of green technologies through a system of solid verification by registering the EU Environmental Technology Verification scheme as an EU certification mark.
The new SME Strategy will foster circular industrial collaboration among SMEs building on training, advice under the Enterprise Europe Network on cluster collaboration, and on knowledge transfer via the European Resource Efficiency Knowledge Centre.