Zero Waste Europe calls for central EPR body and harmonized EU packaging rules

Zero Waste Europe (ZWE) calls for system optimization, harmonized rules, and transparency in the EU’s packaging EPR. The environmental network’s latest study also points to the need for a central registry of producers and a European EPR oversight body to tackle key issues. 

The study, “Designing EPR to Foster the EU’s Competitiveness and Strategic Autonomy,” examines the regulation’s 30-year history and proposes a framework to boost circularity.

“The EU’s circularity material use rate hasn’t increased in the last ten years,” Joan Marc Simon, founder at ZWE, tells Packaging Insights. “For most waste streams, waste generation is growing faster than recycling rates, and almost all funding mobilized via EPR is to finance collection and management of waste, not prevention, reuse, repair or eco-design.”

The study further argues that EPR fees are insufficient to positively impact product design. “Right now, EPR fees in the EU are just too low to move the needle,” explains Simon. “Often less than 0.5% of a product’s cost.”

“If we want EPR to drive circularity, we need a dual system: one fee to handle waste, and another at the EU level to push companies toward reusable, repairable, and more sustainable products.”

In addition to the current EPR’s limited impact on waste prevention and design, the study outlines the decline in reuse and repair, varied collection rates, insufficient cost coverages, lack of transparency, free-riding, and fragmentation as key issues with the EPR.

In order to ameliorate these issues and “unlock EPR’s full potential,” ZWE’s report lays out a two-pillar plan. 

Producers not paying their share 

The EU’s circularity material use rate hasn’t increased in the last 10 years, finds ZWE.The first pillar is focused on system optimization, referring to rule harmonization across EU member states, transparency, the creation of a central registry of producers, and the establishment of a European EPR oversight body to tackle administrative burdens and free-riding while supporting “a functioning single market for producer responsibility.”

Simon argues that free-riding means “some producers aren’t paying their fair share” to manage the waste their products create. 

“This undercuts the businesses that do pay and weakens the system as a whole. Without stronger rules enforcement, polluters will slip through the cracks and hold us back from a true circular economy.”

Harmonization vital for everyone 

Discussing the proposed EPR oversight body, Simon says that it would act as “a one-stop shop for registration and reporting, and influence harmonized EPR rules.”

The oversight body will also monitor reporting to ensure credible and comparable data, monitor borders to crack down on free-riders, and support the creation of new EPR systems in and outside the EU.

“In general, member states are reluctant to let go of the capacity to regulate the national market but at the same time are not capable of properly managing them,” he explains.

“AZWE calls for the EPR to finance waste prevention, reuse, and repair to ensure circularity. way to overcome this is by showing that it is in the interest of companies and member states to work with harmonized rules since this will bring down costs by streamlining administration and bureaucracy and provide much more reliable data, which should bring better value for money for companies and consumers.” 

Financing truly circular packaging

The second pillar outlined in the ZWE study asserts that EPR fees should not only cover costs, but also help fund waste prevention, reuse, and repair through dedicated repair funds, reuse infrastructure, and supportive policy measures.

According to Simon, the packaging industry can help push “to have better run, more transparent and harmonized EPR systems, making the system more efficient.”

“On the other hand, they [industry] need to come to terms with the fact that optimizing a linear economy is a suboptimal goal in the current EU context and that, sooner or later, they will need to finance the transition to a circularity that goes beyond recycling.”

Simon reminds us that the PPWR sets prevention and reuse objectives. It is the role of players in the next generation of EPR systems “to finance the circularity measures necessary to deliver them.”