The Industry Position on the Future of Packaging Policy in Europe

Remarks by Salvatore Gabola, Chairman, EUROPEN, The European Organization for Packaging and the Environment - Given at the 14th European Packaging Waste Law conference, 20 - 21 March 2007, Brussels

I must say I have a sense of deja-vu being here. I must have participated in my first Agra Europe conference on packaging and packaging waste about ten years ago - and I see many of the same faces and, I suspect, I will hear many of the same arguments. Yet things have changed. And I believe we need to learn from some of the successes and from some of the failures we have witnessed in these years.

So let me try to talk about some of them

And let me start with some facts.

Actually, I believe that we should make a bit of an effort in ensuring that any political debate on packaging and packaging waste starts indeed from the facts. There is nothing that irritates me more than political proposals on packaging waste, for example new packaging tax measures patently aimed simply at filling a hole in the budget, loudly flagged as a response to the "growing packaging waste mountain". The growing packaging waste mountain???

Ladies and gentleman, overall solid waste or municipal solid waste are indeed mountains, and they are indeed growing (municipal solid waste generation per capita was supposed to be stabilized at 1993 levels - it actually doubled, a 100% increase). But packaging waste is only a part of it - 5% overall, 17% of MSW - and a part that is actually shrinking - because packaging waste generation only grew in the last 10 years by 8%, less than 1% a year, which means much less than the growth of GDP and of the amounts of packaging products sold. This is relative decoupling; it means less packaging per item sold, it means packaging's part in the MSW mountain is shrinking.

And not only this: this diminishing part of the solid waste mountain is recovered at very high levels and growing - 62% at the last official count in 2002, 66% in provisional 2004 figures, and certainly much more now. Let's move from mountains to what is now glamorous Hollywood speech - let's talk about climate change. Packaging manufacturing and consumption causes 80 Mt of CO2 emissions (2%of overall EU CO2 emissions) - and hardly growing. But recovery means that 25 Mt per year are avoided, and this huge offsetting is growing.