24 June 2022 – CLG Europe Director Eliot Whittington sent a letter to the Competitiveness Council reflecting on the discussion around the Strategic Industrial Ecosystems and Empowering Consumers on the Green Transition.
Read the letter in full here.
Following the June Competitiveness Council, the letter aims to highlight how the Competitiveness Council, working with industry, can ensure a successful green transition, underpinned by the European Green Deal and the EU Industrial Strategy.
CLG Europe highlights the importance of linking the discussion around strategic dependencies, robust trade policies and fostering investment with the wider ambitions of meeting Net Zero by 2050. The aims of the Green Deal must be interlinked with our industrial ecosystems to ensure a green, prosperous future for the economy.
Ahead of the REPowerEU energy plan, over 150 businesses and business networks including Microsoft, Unilever, H&M, Signify and Iberdrola wrote to President Ursula Von Der Leyen around the key role of accelerating the green transition. the letter states: ‘At the core of the current energy security and price crises sits an overdependence on volatile, imported fossil gas, oil and coal. It is time for all of us to take necessary steps to strengthen Europe’s energy security and resilience by accelerating the green transition.’
CLG Europe welcomed the discussion around the role of the consumer in building a climate neutral and circular European economy. CLG Europe welcomes the setting of a horizontal baseline of standards for sustainability information, whilst also looking to address the issue of loopholes and misleading labels which occur in this space. Nonetheless, as this is closely linked to the upcoming ‘substantiating green claims’ legislation, which is to be presented at the end of 2022, we note it is hard to gain a full picture of the measures the European Commission plans to propose.
More widely, building a circular economy is essential to contribute to the EU’s climate objectives. Circularity addresses embedded emissions in materials and products, an area which so far has received less attention.
CLG Europe’s Taskforce for Climate Neutral and Circular Materials and Products published an analysis of this legislation as well as the rest of the Circular Economy Package published by the Commission at the end of March which can be found here.