Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-15-Speech-2-037"
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"en.20010515.3.2-037"2
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"Mr President, more than thirty years ago an organisation called 'Friends of the Earth' was born in my country. I seem to remember a publicity stunt that featured an enormous mound of bottles which were no longer going to be returned for refilling but were simply going to be dumped in a landfill site. I was twelve or thirteen at the time and that publicity and the photographs on television woke many of us up to the concerns we still have for the environment and drew our attention to the waste of resources attached to so much of our way of living and our manufacturing processes.
I am sorry that so many years later my own country is one of those which is trailing behind the countries of the rapporteur and the Commissioner in improving its recycling rate. So I am pleased that we have this European legislation, and indeed the whole waste strategy of the Commission, which is forcing individual countries like my own that are recalcitrant and bow too easily to industry pressure on their own doorstep to recognise and put into practice the principles of sustainability. These countries are very happy to talk about these principles on a wider stage but are reluctant to put them into practice on their own doorstep. The principle here that the producer should accept responsibility for the whole life of the product and ensure that the problems caused by that production are not passed on to future generations is one which we should embrace very strongly.
So I welcome this legislation and consider it important that industry in my country and perhaps countries elsewhere should recognise that if it does not seize the opportunity to modernise its processes and live up to the high environmental standards then it will lose out on market opportunities across Europe.
Two dilemmas have been pointed out concerning lead and brominated flame retardants. I put this one question to the Commissioner about the issue of low-cost, low-energy light bulbs: Is it better to have them recycled but to put up the cost, or is it better to keep down the cost, encourage their use and perhaps tackle the other serious environmental problem of global warming a little bit more rapidly than we might otherwise be able to do?"@en1
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