AIM – European Brands Association and several industry associations have signed a letter calling on the European Commission to take urgent action to ensure a common approach for packaging waste-sorting labelling to preserve the free movement of goods within the EU and underpin sustainability measures.
Providing relevant and consistent information to consumers on how to properly dispose of both the products and their packaging is essential to enhance collection rates and improve the quality of the material collected. However, in the course of the last year industry has been confronted with a concerning trend of divergent national packaging labelling and information requirements. This is not only counter to the work underway at EU level of moving towards greater harmonisation of waste collection and sorting, but it is inevitably resulting in major Single Market disruptions and, in turns, undermining Europe’s sustainability goals.
The current review of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive (Directive 94/62/EC) represents a great opportunity to set common requirements on which information should be provided to consumers and how this should be done, including the use of digital solutions that can help provide required information without the need to increase packaging size or repackage. In parallel, the work initiated by the Commission to harmonise separate waste collection and sorting, as required by the Waste Framework Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC), will be key to the effectiveness of harmonised labelling requirements.
