Where is the Environment?
Today, 27 October 2015, the Commission published their Annual Work Plan.
It is bare reading on the environment front. There is only one substantive legislative proposal, the re-tabling of the withdrawn circular economy package. It falls under the title ” A New Boost for Jobs, Growth and Investment”. It’s like the Environmental Chapter of the Treaty (Title XX in case you were wondering) has been tippexed out.
I come to this with historical baggage. I am old enough to remember when the EU was the global centre for environmental leadership and regulatory innovation. The rules and standards adopted in Brussels were taken up across the world (USA excluded) and were seen as the gold standard of good regulation. The European Commission realised that when they acted on the environment they generated tremendous goodwill towards the European project. And, the environmental standards in Europe were enhanced, and doomsayers prophecies of economic collapse were never borne out. Today, those ideas are unfashionable, to say the least in Brussels.
What of Today
The Commission states ” The aim is to address economic and environmental concerns by maximizing efficiency in the use of resources, covering the whole value chain (including sustainable consumption, production, waste management) and through innovation, thereby enabling the development of new markets and business models. The package will consist of a broad action plan, including actions on monitoring effective progress, and a waste proposal with long-term targets.”
I have highlighted the environmental initiatives.
cwp_2016_annex_i_en
The concrete legislative package will be updating the current Waste Framework Directive and the daughter directives (WEEE, Packaging and Packaging Waste, ELV, etc). This will likely centre around new targets and deadlines.
It is unclear whether the package will tackle knotty issues of the reform of Chemical Regulation that would allow a genuine Circular Economy and how to handle so-called contaminated recylates back into the production system. Whether the package will reflect the thinking of “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things” remains to be seen.
Other Initiatives
Other ongoing evaluations on REACH, Nature protection, Occupational Health and Safety legislation, continue their way through the byzantine new Commission system for revision.
Impact
With such slim pickings, the Member States and EP will have a lot more time to closely examine any and all Commission legislative proposals. Secondly, this will likely mean the EP in particular will take the role of examining all too often important delegated legislation proposals in a lot more depth.