EU Environment Commissioner Karmenu Vella criticised efforts to water down or weaken the recycling targets proposed by the Commission as part of the 2015 circular economy package in remarks at Mondays meeting of the Environment Council in Brussels. Calling the Commission's targets "ambitious yet realistic", he stressed that the Commission had built in extra time for more poorly performing member states to achieve compliance. "In this light the Commission would regret both lower the target levels and any attempts to weaken the recycling targets," Mr Vella said.
The environment commissioner also stressed that proposed changes to the calculation methodology would make the resulting data more reliable and improve comparability. He viewed the potential "introduction of many types of re-use definitions into the recycling target" as problematic.
