Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-02-Speech-1-059"
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"en.20020902.6.1-059"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the report Mrs Corbey has presented is a comprehensive and ambitious one, and I endorse most of its points. All the Member States need in future to work together, in an active and constructive way, on avoiding packaging waste and on systematically collecting and recycling it. The best possible systems are needed to deal with the approximately 58 million tonnes of packaging waste that the European Union produces every year. They will enable us to ensure better protection for the environment, and also, at the same time, to give important sectors of industry greater security in terms of planning.
There are two amendments that I see as being of enormous importance when we come to the vote. The first has to do with ceramic containers, which have for decades been produced in many Member States, principally France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, but also in family-run businesses in the region from which I come. Ceramic bottles, ceramic pots, and ceramic bowls are nowadays used mainly for the packaging of foodstuffs, but also for the packaging of distilled liquors, chocolates, patés and so on, and they make up only 0.1% of the European Union's waste packaging, in other words, 60 000 tonnes out of a total 58 million tonnes. Such ceramic packaging consists of nothing but baked clay and does not, therefore, contain pollutants of any sort.
The characteristics of the material make the recovery of the used ceramic containers pointless. They cannot be recovered thermally, nor can they be recycled. They are inert and pose no risk to the environment. Locating such small quantities separately, collecting them separately and transporting them for thousands of kilometres across the Member States, would make no sense in either environmental or economic terms. I therefore ask you to support Amendment No 68, which creates a derogation for small quantities as regards recovery targets.
My second point has to do with the recognition given by the Directive to the latest processes for reprocessing plastics. If we are to amend this Directive, we should take the opportunity to also make the objectives set by law technically up to date. Amendment No 43 provides for the recovery of materials from plastics, facilitating the use of polluted waste plastics to produce plastics as good as new. This process makes perfect sense in both ecological and economic terms and has proved its technical worth on a large scale.
In Germany, for example, it has already been used to recover raw materials from over 1.8 million tonnes of waste plastic. Technology of this sort has enormous potential, providing as it does another method for recovering synthetic materials in addition to the melting down of plastic packaging of genuinely high value and the merely thermal recovery of mixed plastics in waste incineration plants. That is why it should be incorporated into the Directive.
Over and above this, the protection of consumers makes it necessary for packaging materials to be safe, for them to comply with the requirement that the hazards of waste be minimised, and for the manufacture of packaging to use the most up to date technology. I do not think much of the idea of developing environmental indicators for packaging. The Commission should, rather, be working towards definite criteria for the assessment of the impact packaging has on the environment.
We need this Directive in order to establish a working system for managing packaging waste in all the Member States of the European Union."@en1
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