The setting was Brussels in March 2020, and the ambition was continental. On 11 March 2020 the European Commission put forward a fresh Circular Economy Action Plan, presented by Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičiųs as the newest initiative of the European Green Deal. It followed a first plan, dating from 2015 and completed in March 2019, that had been widely hailed as a success; the successor was always meant to pick up the baton quickly.
The idea underneath is elegantly simple. “In a linear economy we extract, produce and then throw away, whereas in a circular economy we eliminate waste by closing the cycle when reusing and recycling, changing the perception of value in the process”, explains Hanna Sjölund of Stockholm University’s Baltic Sea Centre. In Commission language, the plan means decoupling economic growth from resource use, within the Green Deal’s overarching push for climate neutrality by 2050. Structurally it rests on two pillars, making products more sustainable and delivering “less waste, more value”, backed by sectoral measures for seven “key product value chains”.
Construction, one of the so-called “harder-to-abate” sectors, shows the method. By the end of 2020 the Commission was to launch a “Strategy for a Sustainable Built Environment”, potentially integrating life cycle assessments into public procurement or lifting targets for recovering construction and demolition waste. A later revision of the Construction Product Regulation could introduce recycled content requirements, no small matter given that the regulation already covers over thirty categories of products in wood, cement and steel, and that European standardisation offices would rather not touch it. As of 2021, the plan also ties circular practices into a review of the Industrial Emissions Directive, which today governs pollutant emissions from steel and cement plants but not circular economy needs.
The Baltic Sea gives the plan its sharpest test. As a semi-closed brackish coastal sea it is especially vulnerable to the nutrients and hazardous substances that a linear economy flushes seaward, and the Baltic Sea Centre welcomes the Commission’s promised nutrient management plan, hoping for a market in organic fertilisers from manure. It also urges a modernised Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive with a fourth step of advanced treatment to catch micropollutants, pharmaceuticals and microplastic.
Whether industry and regulators can strike deals over cement, procurement and chemicals will decide if this remains paper. As one analysis put it, the construction measures show the European Green Deal is “not just about a lofty destination but also a precise itinerary”. Europe has drawn that itinerary before; the circular test is walking it.
Sources
- Promising action plan for circular economy
- logos public affairs – Prospects for making construction more circular
