At last Friday’s Council meeting, environment ministers from several EU member states called for longer deadlines to reach the new waste management targets proposed by the European Commission in December. The ministers, who represented some of the more recent EU members, also repeated the request for the different "starting positions” of the individual member states to be taken into account.
The debate was intended to focus on the action plan for a circular economy, published by the Commission alongside its four legislative proposals for amending EU Directives on waste which contain the new targets. These targets include reducing the landfilling of municipal waste to 10 per cent of arisings by 2030.
In the debate, many member states expressed support for the repairability, reusability and recyclability of products to be covered by the Ecodesign Directive. There was also support for quality standards for secondary raw materials and the removal of market barriers for their wider use.