Around 59 million tonnes of food are thrown away in the European Union every year, more than 130 kilos per person. In addition, 12.6 million tons of textiles end up in the garbage, of which 5.2 million are clothes and shoes, which corresponds to 12 kilos per citizen. A waste that is not just a big waste when in so many other parts of the world, even in Europe itself, millions of people do not have enough to eat. They also deplete already over-exploited and often over-produced land and natural resources with harmful pesticides, while contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.
The European Commission presented a series of circular economy proposals this Wednesday, aimed in particular at reducing textile and food waste through binding waste reduction targets and promoting the recycling of clothing. At the same time, it has presented another package of measures for a more sustainable use of land and natural resources, including a proposal to regulate new plant genomics techniques to achieve more resistant crops. The latter has sparked fierce controversy between environmental and agriculture platforms, who fear it could reduce previously tight controls on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), or transgenes.
The ambitious package, unveiled this Wednesday – with the European elections already scheduled for less than a year and the time to legislate shrinking – consists of several parts.
On the one hand, Brussels wants to significantly reduce food waste, which not only accounts for 132 billion euros in annual losses, but is also responsible for 252 million tons of CO2, i.e. around 16% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. European food system.
“If food waste were a country, it would be the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the EU,” said European Green Pact Vice-President Frans Timmermans.
Brussels wants member states to be committed to reducing food waste per capita by 30% in supermarkets, restaurants and households by 2030, and another 10% in manufacturing and processing. The figures, which will be reviewed at the end of 2027 to see if an upward revision is possible, are “in the direction of the global goal” of halving food waste, as set out in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
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Reducing food waste will also have a positive impact on Europeans’ wallets: the Commission estimates that if the proposed targets are met, a four-person household will save on average €400 a year.
In the same vein are the proposals to reduce textile waste and encourage its ‘reuse and recycling’, of which only 22% is currently recovered; the rest often ends up in “incineration or landfill”.
From January 1, 2025, the Twenty-Seven will already have to carry out separate collection of textile waste. In order to further prioritize the sorting of this waste and thus facilitate its reuse or recycling, Brussels now wants to apply the so-called “extended producer responsibility” in a “binding and harmonized” way, which makes producers responsible for the environmental impact of their products. As in industries such as packaging, batteries or electronic devices, manufacturers have to “cover the costs of disposing of textile waste”. Something that, according to the commission, will “give them incentives to reduce waste and increase the circularity of textile products by developing better products from the start”.
“Short term, [las medidas] You will help to finance waste management based on the polluter pays principle,” said Environment Commissioner Viriginijus Sinkevicius. In the longer term, they want to “strengthen the circularity of textile production, promote circular economy business models and fight fast fashion”.
In addition, Brussels wants to ban the sending of discarded materials to third countries without corresponding environmental regulations, to prevent them from being “disguised” as recycled materials.
soil protection
Beyond obvious economic savings, these proposals aim to complement initiatives to recover overexploited land and raw materials, within the ambitious environmental targets set by the EU. To this end, Brussels also presented another package this Wednesday to protect soils and make crops more efficient and resistant to pests and extreme weather conditions through the so-called new plant genome techniques (NGT, for the English acronym NGT).
“We want to give our farmers the tools to produce healthy and safe food, adapted to our changing climate and respectful of our planet,” said EU Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides, responsible for the proposal for the realization of “systems of”. More resilient nutrition with new genomic techniques”.
The proposed technique differs from that of GMOs or transgenic plants, where foreign genetic code is introduced into a plant to improve it. This is a strictly regulated process in Europe and is only allowed if there is a positive ad hoc opinion from the European Food Safety Authority.
Unlike GMOs, the new techniques only modify the genome of the plant itself or introduce equivalent material. The legislation proposes two categories of plants generated by NGT: those that are comparable to the changes that occur naturally in conventional plants (cisgenesis) and are subject only to a review process, and others with more complex changes (mutagenesis ) that are subject to such a procedure Similar requirements to current transgene legislation apply.
Brussels believes that the proposed regulation will increase “the variety and quality of seeds, cuttings and other propagating material” of plants while guaranteeing “stable harvests” with more resistant plant varieties, which in turn will lead to a reduction in for example the use of pesticides.
Some arguments that, according to agency Efe, fail to convince are environmental platforms and small farmers who have collected almost half a million signatures against these “new GMOs” which they claim are responding to pressure from companies like Bayer/Monsanto. They also claim that the precautionary principle could be used to block this cultivation, an objective the Commission is not considering.
In addition to genetic modification, you want to improve soil health. In the EU, between 60 and 70% of soils are currently ‘sick’. Erosion also carries away billions of tons of soil each year, meaning the fertile topsoil is “quickly disappearing,” the commission points out. The costs associated with this soil degradation amount to more than 50 billion euros a year, recalls a Brussels resident who is always careful to set a number for his measures or not to apply them. For this reason, the Commission wants, among other things, a new directive that would oblige states to control the state of their soils, establish the principles of their sustainable management and encourage countries to promote their implementation in order to restore the health of the microorganisms in the soil . Country.
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