GEIR News June 2021

30/06/2021

Since March, the work of the European Union has been progressing on different pieces of legislation of relevance to the re-refining industry.

The European Commission has recently put forward two Inception Impact Assessments, also called roadmaps, aiming to revise the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) and the Classification, Labelling and Packaging (CLP) regulations. As envisaged in the EU Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, the revision of these pieces of legislation would serve as a first legislative step towards a more sustainable EU chemical legislation. This fits into the general approach of the EU Green Deal which promotes the development of greener processes and products. GEIR will closely follow the discussions and participate as an active stakeholder in all the consultations of interest to present its best practice in circular and decarbonized economy with a LCA approach.

Besides this, the publication of the EU Green Deal has announced the revision of EU measures addressing pollution from large industrial installations. Ahead of the publication of the proposal expected in the course of this year, an impact assessment of the Evaluation and Revision under European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) Regulation has been launched by the Commission. This was followed by a targeted stakeholder consultation to which GEIR submitted its feedback, notably stressing the importance to focus on the most relevant pollutants, in a cost-benefit approach. 

Finally, GEIR has been monitoring the progress of the ongoing feasibility study on waste oils treatment drafted by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). At this stage, JRC has completed the data collection and is proceeding with calculations and data verification. The draft results will be shared with GEIR in order to provide comments and feedback.