The Commission Presents New Proposals to Make Sustainable Products the Norm in the EU

This week, the European Commission published a package of proposals to make sustainable products the norm in the EU, boost circular business models and empower consumers as part of the European Green Deal. The Commission is proposing new rules to make almost all physical goods on the EU market with lower levels of environmental impacts, as well as circular and energy-efficient throughout their whole lifecycle from the design phase through to daily use, repurposing and end-of-life.

The package presented by the Commission also includes:

• A strategy to tackle fast fashion.
• A proposal to boost the internal market for construction products in line with the EU sustainability and climate objectives.
• New rules to empower consumers in the green transition, in particular through labelling requirements.

The proposal aims to make daily products fit for a climate-neutral, resource-efficient and circular economy approach across Europe. It includes provisions, in particular, to increase the energy performance of products; reduce their carbon footprint; streamline labelling requirements on circularity.

The proposal will be followed by the adoption of delegated acts for specific product categories, in particular textiles, furniture, mattresses, tyres, detergents, paints, lubricants, as well as intermediate products like iron, steel and aluminium, which will detail specific provisions to ensure they decrease their footprint.

Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) can help defossilise emissions and reduce the carbon footprint of those daily products, and specific provisions could be directly linked to recycling CO₂ (e.g. targets for replacing fossil carbon feedstock with non-fossil carbon feedstock) as one of the levers to reduce net emissions for all those categories.

The INITIATE project will advance the implementation of circular economy, industrial symbiosis and carbon capture and utilisation technologies (CCU) by re-using residual steel gases as a resource for the cross-sectorial, more efficient and less wasteful manufacture of urea, at a significantly reduced carbon footprint.

 

More on the Sustainable Products Initiative here.