Brussels, 17 December 2021
Today, FESI and 40 other industry associations are calling the EU to establish an harmonised system to provide consumers with understandable and clear sorting instructions for packaging waste. Such a system is crucial in order to boost recycling across the EU.
In order to boost a circular economy and achieve the EU (packaging) recycling targets by 2025/2030, set out in the Packaging & Packaging Waste Directive (PPWD) and Waste Framework Directive (WFD), the collection rates in the EU must increase. Alongside industry’s efforts to establish a better and more efficient collection, sorting and recycling infrastructure for post-consumer waste and to continuously improve packaging ecodesign, it is now essential to engage consumers to achieve this goal. This can be done by improving the separate waste collection rate at consumer level, increasing consumers’ awareness about the need to sort and recycle, making sorting easy for consumers, and including them as relevant actors in the circular management of waste.
With this in mind, the undersigned organisations are putting forward a concrete and actionable solution to establish an easy and understandable system for correct sorting at source. An EU harmonised labelling system that helps consumers to correctly sort their waste and at the same time avoids any barriers to trade needs to become integral to the waste management systems in EU Member States. In order to work and to be implementable on an EU-wide scale, the system needs to be simple, cost-effective and efficient for all stakeholders.
