March 11, 2020, the EU Commission presented its Circular Economy Action Plan elaborating aspects of the “New Industrial Strategy for a globally competitive, green and digital Europe” published the day before.
The Circular Economy Action Plan contains a section on planned action towards “Designing sustainable products“. It is pointed out that the linear pattern of “take-make-use-dispose” does not provide producers with sufficient incentives to make their products more circular and that the EU single market provides a critical mass enabling the EU to set global standards in product sustainability and to influence product design and value chain management worldwide.
In order to ensure that all products placed on the EU market become increasingly sustainable and stand the test of circularity, the Commission will propose a sustainable product policy legislative initiative. The core of this legislative initiative will be to widen the “Ecodesign Directive” beyond energy-related products so as to make the Ecodesign framework applicable to the broadest possible range of products.
As part of this legislative initiative, the Commission will consider establishing sustainability principles and other appropriate ways to regulate, including reducing carbon and environmental footprints and “mobilising the potential of digitalisation of product information, including solutions such as digital passports, tagging and watermarks”.
Part of the idea is rewarding products based on their different sustainability performance, including by linking high performance levels to incentives.
This legislative initiative and any other complementary regulatory or voluntary approaches will be developed in a way to improve the coherence with existing EU instruments regulating products along various phases of their life cycle. It is the intention of the Commission that the product sustainability principles will guide broader policy and legislative developments in the future.
These provisions of the Circular Economy Action Plan chime perfectly with the TrueTwins digital passport designed for these very purposes and enabling brands to differentiate themselves in the sustainability space ahead of the regulation now under way.