According to The European Organisation For Packaging and the Environment (EUROPEN) article published on April 17, 2023, more than 120 packaging industry associations issued a joint letter urging co-legislators to preserve in its entirety the internal market legal basis of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, as the best way to achieve the environmental and economic objectives of the proposal.
The internal market legal basis serves to address the differences among the various national rules on the management of packaging and packaging waste and resulting internal market barriers, while providing a high level of environmental protection.
In recent years, the packaging value chain has been under pressure due to an increase of unilateral and divergent national packaging requirements, such as packaging bans, reuse and recycled content targets, and labelling requirements.
As co-legislators discuss moving away from an internal market legal basis, or opting for a dual one, the packaging industry stresses that taking this route would further exacerbate these pressures by increasing fragmentation of the Union market and paving the way for a patchwork of national packaging legislations, thus undermining the objective of creating one circular economy comprising all Member States, to the detriment of consumer safety, environmental protection and European competitiveness. Europe needs just one circular economy covering the whole bloc, not 27 miniature ones.
