2.2 EU Plastic-Related Regulations: Evolution of Target Setting

BOX 2.2 EU Plastic-Related Regulations: Evolution of Target Setting

The past 30 years of European Union (EU) legislation provide a lesson in the evolution of setting targets to reduce plastic pollution. The current plastics strategya was adopted in 2018 and is now part of the EU circular economy action planb adopted in 2020. It builds on previous legislation that focused on solid waste management but proved insufficient to stem the flow of plastic to the environment. The updated framework covers the whole value chain; it includes measures upstream of the life cycle and complements the previous downstream-focused framework.

Until recently, plastic pollution was regulated in the framework of waste management regulations that were established in the early 1990s by the Urban Waste Management Directive and Landfill Directive. In 1994, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive called on member states to look upstream and prioritize prevention, reuse, and recovery of packaging before it becomes waste. A growing realization of the high costs of waste management systems triggered the evolution of targets to include separate collection of packaging waste in the 2008 Waste Directive. The evolution further led to adoption of the Waste Framework Directive in 2018, which consolidated scattered waste legislation and called for a more system-wide approach to waste, formally integrating the waste hierarchy into the EU legal system (EU 2018), introducing the “polluter pays” principle and extended producer responsibility, and setting new separate collection targets.

The plastic strategy builds on previous legislation and targets set in the previous three decades, and it informs the development of the European Commission’s Directive on Reduction of the Impact of Certain Plastic Products on the Environment (commonly referred to as the Single-Use Plastics Directive). One objective (protect the environment and human health by reducing marine litter, greenhouse gas emissions, and dependence on imported fossil fuels) and the main ways to achieve it have focused specific targets on particular items found on beaches (for example, restrictions on use of beverage containers or bans on select single-use plastic items when available and affordable alternatives exist) and on increasing recycling. Targets include reaching 77 percent separate collection for plastic bottles by 2025, increasing to 90 percent by 2029, incorporating 25 percent of recycled plastic in polyethylene terephthalate beverage bottles from 2025, and including 30 percent of all plastic beverage bottles by 2030.

Source: World Bank. a. The current strategy can be found at https://ec.europa.eu/environment/strategy/plastics -strategy_en?msclkid=734f618daa0d11ec8f284b9d5e4397ac. b. The EU circular economy plan can be found at https://ec.europa.eu/environment/strategy /circular-economy-action-plan_en?msclkid=f976fab1aa0d11ecadcdc9d41353a617.

• Targets can be specific to solid waste management and include rates of collection, recycling, incineration, and organized landfilling of waste that the society wants to reach by a specific date; for example, increasing the handling rate of waste to 70 percent in Indonesia. • Targets for reduction of waste at the source can be generic, such as reducing waste at the source by 30 percent in Indonesia, or can be more specific to a category of products (for example, collecting 100 percent of abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear and eliminating single-use plastics and nonbiodegradable plastic bags from coastal tourist attractions by 2030 in Vietnam; or reducing the use of targeted single-use plastics by 90 percent from 2020/21 to 2026 in Bangladesh).

The European Union, and to some extent Japan and South Korea, include targets for extending the longevity of plastic products through redesign to make them reusable and ready to repair. • Targets are also sometimes set for restricting waste imports, such as the Chinese

National Sword Policy launched in 2017 by the government of China.

Any target setting needs to reflect baseline levels and keep affordability criteria in mind to be realistic and achievable. Moving up the waste hierarchy and introducing policies for greater circularity is expensive, as experienced by countries with advanced waste management systems, since it requires investments in improved infrastructure and results in higher operational costs for collection, sorting, and waste treatment. Costs for solid waste management in the highest-performing countries in Europe can go up to US$350/ton for waste treated. The user fees that need to be raised to cover these costs stay typically below the commonly used benchmark for assessing affordability of 1 to 1.5 percent of disposable income. Costs in low-income countries, on the other hand, often exceed that threshold, although the waste management systems are much more basic (collection, partial recycling, disposal). Moving up the hierarchy from landfilling to preventing waste requires alignment of incentives of economic actors operating upstream in the value chain, such as producers, converters, consumer goods companies, and consumers, with those operating in the downstream, waste management segments of the value chain. This concept is explained further in chapter 4.

Several decision-support tools are used to inform target setting. Some economic tools are designed to estimate the cost of inaction—in other words, the benefits of action to reduce plastic pollution, considering that benefits come from avoided costs. Some of these benefits are monetized using valuation techniques based on market prices or—in the absence of markets—“shadow prices” derived from hypothetical people’s willingness to pay. The benefits of reducing plastic pollution can be compared with the costs of doing it, using cost-benefit analysis. Not all benefits of reducing