Welcome to the Circular Economy Coalition for Europe - CEC4Europe.
A pan-european network of researchers and scientists
and we are all striving to support the European institutions in their endeavor
to create a circular economy. We want to support these institutions with
evidence-based data and facts, because we want a fact-based circular economy.
Our topic today is the circular economy from a European,
from a EU perspective and if we take a look at the bigger picture, we can see that
Europe imports 1.8 billion tonnes of raw materials, fuels and goods every year.
At the same time we export some 600 million, only one third. A part of the surplus
leaves us as off gas from incineration or into the wastewater system.
Some wastes remain in our countries. But the biggest part of these goods
and of the surplus remains in use in our man-made environment. So we accumulate.
This flow of materials and this accumulation is not a bad thing, it is just
the expression of a global disparity between our raw material stocks and the demand
for raw materials. And as a society we developed a toolbox to compensate
for this disparity, for the uneven distribution of raw materials and
let's take a brief look at these tools: First we have geology. Well, this is a given.
We hardly can change where the geogenic stocks occur and where we can dig
for ores or for oil so we developed economy, economic tools:
Trade - give me what I need and I will pay for you. I will have a barter.
We developed diplomacy - long term contracts between countries to sustain the raw material basis
and ultimately we can see that even war is a tool to secure resources.
And finally we have technology in three aspects: resource efficiency -
use less resources for your target or have a higher output from a given amount of resources,
substitution of critical, hazardous, of scarce raw materials and finally recycling.
Nowadays we have a fourth discipline of tools: sociology - we have
to question our demand for services and goods, the way we purchase, we decide
on purchases, the way we use goods and finally the potential of sharing economy.
You probably know all these instruments and they are commonplace in many
EU documents. From our raw materials initiatives to the roadmap for
resource efficient Europe. And the same is true for the European Circular Economy Package
as issued on 2nd of December 2015. Here we can see the political goals
of the European Circular Economy Package. We want environmental protection,
we want a secure supply of raw materials for our industry and we want to support
economic benefit and growth. Well, these are political terms, but in business language
that means: we need effectiveness and efficiency.
As experts, dear colleagues, you are all familiar with the five layers of
the European hierarchy for waste management - beginning at the top with prevention of waste and reuse
and recycling and energy recovery or other forms of recovery and finally
disposal as the least preferred option - a landfill. But don't get me wrong:
we still need landfills as a final sink for residues.
But if these are the priorities of the EU with respect to waste management,
statistics tell us a different story. This chart, dear colleagues, shows you
the share of land filling for the treatment of post-consumer waste, of municipal solid waste
in the EU member states. As we can see from this chart, 13 member states
of the European Union still landfill more than 50% of their municipal solid waste,
which is a waste of resources in itself and 15 member states have
more than 30% of land filling. This is quite contradictory to
the hierarchy we just saw. So in the Circular Economy Package the European Union
strives at a handful of targets: one is to divert waste from landfills -
In 2030 there is a maximum of 10 percent in each and every member state
that should be disposed of at controlled landfills. Much more than we have today.
The European Parliament even votes for five percent maximum landfill in the European Union.
The recycling of municipal solid waste shall be increased
to 65 percent in 2030 and according to the parliament even 70 percent.
For recycling it's 75 percent and so on and so on. So we see almost a race
to increase recycling and recovery from municipal solid waste.
Is this the right target?
Well, I mentioned effectiveness and efficiency and sometimes we see
an obsession to raise targets as opposed to find the right targets. There's a conflict
between maximum and optimum. We all know that recycling needs energy:
for collection, for sorting, for conditioning, for transport. So there's a tipping point
and after a certain value of recycling the savings are not enough to
support recycling anymore - the savings of raw materials. So recycling rates close to
70, 80, 90 percent bear the risk of overshooting. So our message is:
We should find the optimum of recycling and not the maximum in order to achieve
environmental protection while saving resources. When we compare the recycling rates
of the European member states, we can see that we have a union of many speeds.
We have frontrunners - Germany, Austria, Belgium and other member states -
and we have laggards. And prior to increasing the targets even further,
we should harmonize the recycling levels within the European Union, because
the current situation is a distortion of competition and it's
the wrong incentive towards member states with low waste treatment costs
and that deviates waste from recycling - not something we want to see in the Union.
Recycling and recovery targets and even landfill bans for municipal solid waste
are important things, they're important instruments towards a circular economy.
But we should not forget that immiscible solid waste pertains to only some seven
to ten percent of the total waste generation in the European Union.
We should not forget that the majority of wastes occur in industrial businesses
and operations, in the construction business, in the demolition business
and in my opinion the most important part of the Circular Economy Package is
the action plan - the action plan, a very readable document, lists in seven chapters
54 important areas of activity. It's not an action plan yet, it's neither action nor
a plan, but it's a very comprehensive list of areas we should address
in the near future to achieve a circular economy. And it goes all along the value chain.
From product design and production to consumption, waste management -
it puts the emphasis on five important waste streams where you can of course
find critical raw materials: plastics, biogenic waste, demolition and construction wastes
and others. And it goes to finance, innovation and monitoring, because we need
better data for a sound resource management.
Circular economy goes far beyond waste management. Here you can see in a chart, that is based
on thoughts of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, how a circular economy could look like
and you will notice instantly, it's not just one circle, one loop.
It's a cascade actually. We try to keep on various stages functionalities, parts,
materials and energy in the loop, in the circle. So we can go from the maintenance
and repair services to the reuse of parts, to the refurbishment
and then finally to recycling or energy recovery. But let's not forget:
There will always be losses and leakages, there is no hundred percent efficiency,
not even in recycling. On the other hand, on the left side you see
ecodesign. What does that mean? It means a conscious construction of services and
goods, resource efficient, repair friendly, reuse friendly and finally with a
high functionality and the longevity from the viewpoint of the user.
As a supporting element you will need logistics. Logistics we do not have yet in place
and we still have to develop in order to make these circles and loops truly work.
I mentioned data. Data is an important basis for planning a circular economy.
I will give you one example to show you, to demonstrate you
how misleading waste management data can be. Let's take a look at plastics
and the example is Austria in a given year - 2010. The market input is something like a
million tonnes of plastics in this year. The most frequent use for plastics is,
as you can easily see, packaging. 28%, 280,000 tonnes.
So what happens with these plastic packaging? As we can see almost every single tonne
ends up in the waste management business and is recovered or recycled either as a
raw material or as a refuse-derived fuel. And only a tiny portion at the very top
remains in use longer than one year or still ends up somewhere on a landfill.
So we can handle plastic packaging. It's not a challenge anymore,
it's a daily operation. Second example construction: The second most important area
of application of plastics. Think of window frames, think of pipes and hoses
and then geotextiles and all sorts of things - 250,000 tonnes
And to our all surprise only 20% of these 250,000 tonnes end up in waste management.
Where's the rest? Well, I gave the answer at the very beginning. The rest is still in use.
It's in buildings around us, it's where we live, where we work and it
will become waste. It will be our challenge in 10 or 50 years. But it's not reflected
in the waste management data of today. The look at waste management data is a look
into the past and when we want to design a circular economy, we have to look
into the future and we need the proper data for that.
Waste management data are outdated in this context.
When we want to design a truly sustainable
circular economy, we have to take a look at the full picture. The tiny green square here
in this chart represents, on average, municipal solid waste per capita in Europe.
500 kilograms, half a tonne. We already know that the total amount
of waste generated by industry, by the construction business is ten times bigger.
Fine, five tonnes. So this is the scope of the Circular Economy Package and
of the action plan. And while we statistically generate five tonnes of waste,
we produce ten tons of good, that remain in use - the mobile phone in your pocket,
the suit you're wearing, the car, the subway, the airplane,
the buildings around us. These are the stocks we create, we increase year after year
after year and because we have been doing so over generations, we already
have a rucksack of 400 tonnes per capita. These are raw materials, that are here
and not somewhere else in South Africa, in Latin America or in Southeast Asia.
These are raw materials we can exploit. The downside, colleagues, is: we don't know
where they are, we don't know their chemical, physical composition, the matrix
they're embedded in. We don't know when these stocks will become wastes and will
be available as secondary resources and we even don't know which technologies
and logistics we will then need to use these secondary resources.
This is an enormous field of research and we can all feel proud to be a part of
this venture. When we think of a circular economy, we have to admit that a circle
is a bit romantic. It's an image, but it's a bit misleading, probably.
You can test yourselves: take a sheet of paper, take a pen and draw a circle.
When you do it properly, you will end up at the starting point at, the origin.
Now do the same, take a sheet of paper, try to draw a circle and pull
the paper in one direction while you're drawing. You will end up with a spiral,
with a helix, because this operation is the factor of time. The world is not the same
when our resources in our anthropogenic stocks reappear
as raw materials. You will hardly notice a difference when you take a look at
fast-moving consumer goods like packaging. They are in a recycling loop
a couple of months later. Or a newsprint, a paper. But when you look at cars,
at industrial machinery or it buildings, it can be years or centuries even.
So we have to factor in time and we move away not only from a linear economy to
a circular economy. We have to move even further from a static circle to
a dynamic helix, factoring in the effects of time.
Dear colleagues, to conclude,
the circular economy is an enormous possibility for waste management and
a fascinating area of research for the waste management sector, for our academics.
But let's not forget that this is not the full scope of services we provide
to society. In other parts of the world with other levels of development,
waste management is extremely important to prevent diseases, to secure public health,
to pertain hygiene in conurbations and agglomerations.
So, when we apply circular economy, the principles, let's not forget that we have
to be aware of the full picture. In terms of its scope the paradigm shift towards
a circular economy is on a par with the energy transition towards a low carbon society
or the fourth industrial revolution. And political decisions
of that magnitude require a sound and sufficient empirical and scientific basis.
This is what CEC4Europe works for.
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