News / 11/06/2019

To create level-playing field for biobased products

‘EU needs a Renewable Materials Directive’

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The European Commission should develop a EU Renewable Materials Directive, similar to the one existing for biofuels and bioenergy. This is one of the seven measures identified at the STAR4BBI stakeholders’ workshop in Cologne to achieve a level playing field for biobased products.
Editorial office / Cologne

Over the last three years the EU funded STAR4BBI project has studied policy and standardisation hurdles that biobased industries face. During the recent stakeholders’ workshop, a set of seven measures to achieve better policies and standards for biobased industries had been concluded. These will be shared with the EC and industry associations via a soon to be produced report.

The STAR4BBI partners have developed a set of proposals to legislators and industry to tackle these issues. At the concluding workshop, insights and feedback was provided by industry representatives, standards’ experts and policy makers via interactive table discussions. These helped to confirm and refine the following seven proposals:

  1. Develop an EU Renewable Materials Directive;
  2. Develop sustainability certification of all products under the EU Ecolabel and the CEN standard EN 16751;
  3. Implement a carbon tax at EU level;
  4. Regulate at EU level the design of products and at EU and municipal level their preferred end-of-life routes;
  5. Update the EU Waste Framework Directive and align it with the Circular Economy Package
  6. Make the use of compostable plastic mandatory for certain products in order to assist consumers;
  7. Update the term Genetically Modified Organisms in Directive 2001/18/EC in order to exclude new breeding techniques, currently ruled under this Directive.

All these proposals will be presented to the EU policy makers as final results of STAR4BBI. For the public, these results will be available from September 2019, on the project website.

STAR4BBI is an EU funded project focusing on Standards and Regulations for the Bio-based Industry. The project has started on September 2016 with the duration of 36 months. It is led by the Netherlands Standardisation Institute NEN and comprises the consortium members nova-Institute, TU Berlin and Wageningen University.

STAR4BBI