2. Provisional agreement on the PPWR by the Council and the Parliament
The European Parliament and the Council reached a provisional agreement on the proposed Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR).
Next steps: The provisional agreement will now be submitted to the Member States’ representatives within the Council (Coreper) and to the Parliament’s environment committee for endorsement. If approved, the text will then need to be formally adopted by both institutions, following revision by lawyer-linguists, before it can be published in the EU’s Official Journal and enter into force. The regulation will be applied from 18 months after the date of entry into force.
Note on procedure: The provisional agreement was reached through an accelerated adoption procedure (knows as ‘corrigendum’), which allows MEPs to approve agreements not yet finalized by the technical teams. This is useful given the imminent European elections. A corrected version of these agreements, validated and translated by the legal-linguists, can then be tabled by the next European Parliament, which will be elected on June 9. This system enables the institutions to continue negotiating agreements until mid-March, and the Parliament to approve them until its final plenary session at the end of April. In theory, the next European Parliament will be able to table new amendments when the corrigendum is voted, but it does not happen often in reality
The key topics indicated by FEFPEB on the definition of high quality recycling (direction is open loop), material recycling, empty space ratio IP 50% and the exemption for lightwood packaging are still in the documents.
About definitions
High-quality recycling implies that the recycled materials, based on their preserved technical characteristics, are of equivalent or higher quality compared to the original material and can be used as a substitute to primary raw materials for packaging or similar applications.
The recycled material can be recycled multiple times. To enable the production of high quality recycled raw materials, collection of properly sorted packaging waste is crucial.
The difference between material recycling and high-quality recycling is that material recycling recycles the packaging material into materials, while high-quality recycling recycles the packaging into materials of such quality that they can be used as the same quality grade for packaging or other applications where the quality of the recycled material is retained
Our partners of Denton Global Advisors in Brussels, in close co-operation with the FEFPEB Task Force PPWR, prepare a document with the most important elements for the European wooden pallet and packaging industry, to be shared with the membership and on the agenda of the FEFPEB spring meeting and the FEFPEB congress 2024.
