Exclusive: Trade officials confident of stalling packaging waste law

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There is a strong chance a new law designed to reduce the huge volumes of packaging that end up in landfill or incinerators could be blocked on Friday, according to several well-placed sources, despite a political agreement between the European Parliament and EU governments earlier this month.

The EU’s legislative bodies agreed this month the text of a new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) in back-room talks mediated by the European Commission, a forum known in Brussels as a trilogue. Official adoption should now be a formality, but the European Commission has refused to sign off on the deal.

The EU executive said agreeing to a so-called ‘mirror clause’ introduced at the last minute by France, which would hold firms that want to export to the European single market to the same standards of recycled content as domestic producers of plastic packaging, went “beyond the mandate” of its negotiators.

Since then, the Commission’s directorate-general for trade (DG TRADE) has ratcheted up its efforts to stall the legislation, trying to persuade diplomats and government officials behind the of potential dire trade and diplomacy issues if the law is adopted in its current form.

Euronews has spoken to sources within the European Parliament, EU Council and Commission, none of whom were prepared to go on the record due to the sensitive nature of the impasse involving what has been described as the most heavily lobbied piece of environmental law of the current legislative term.

Senior commission trade officials are “confident” of having persuaded enough governments to oppose the law in its current form, having warned of the “huge economic and potential trade diplomacy issues” of a legal provision that would effective outlaw most of the plastic packaging currently used to ship goods into Europe.

Meanwhile, a source within the EU Council acknowledged it would be “difficult” to muster the necessary qualified majority of EU governments to sign off on the political agreement at the meeting of permanent representatives on Friday (14 March).

Member states must weigh up the warning from the EU executive against the wish to protect EU recyclers and packaging manufacturers from being undercut by more lightly regulated competitors. One diplomatic source told Euronews that the legal services of both the Parliament and Council had concluded that the mirror clause was compliant with World Trade Organisation rules.

The provisional PPWR text sets mandatory recycled content targets for plastic packaging sold on the single market. The disputed clause states that, if it is to count towards meeting this target, the recycled plastic must be gathered in line with EU standards for separate collection then processed in facilities that comply with the same pollution and emissions limits that apply to domestic producers.

According to sources, the commission believes the smoothest way to iron out what it sees as a major problem with the new law is to persuade enough governments of its potential dangers. Its alternatives would be to lodge a formal objection to the amendments made to its proposal, which could only be overruled by unanimous agreement of all 27 member states.

Then there is what one source described as the “nuclear option” – withdrawal of its proposal in its entirety, which would effectively scupper a key piece of Green Deal legislation.

If, as the EU executive hopes, it is rejected on Friday, the council would have to reopen talks with MEPs, and there would be little chance of the law entering into force ahead of EU elections. The Belgian EU Council presidency is treating the end of next week (22 March) as the last chance to get it onto the agenda of the April plenary sitting of the European Parliament, the last before European elections in June.