ETIRA welcomes VA’s move under DG Environment

July 20, 2021

Following the news that the EU’s Voluntary Agreement has moved under DG Environment, rather DG Energy, ETIRA president Javier Martinez, said:

“This is a very clear support for a sector which, in terms of reducing energy consumption during the product use phase, has reached its limits.

“DG Environment will have a much clearer vision of what circular ambition is, and we will see an increased push to ensure durability, repairability and reusability of products, and more customer freedom to move to more ‘truly circular proposals’ where ‘the closest the better’ has to be the priority.

“For example, it does not make any sense to send a printer to a far away, centralised location to be repaired or exchanged, when a technician can fix it locally.

“As for cartridges, it is clear that they have an extremely short use-life, and since they represent the bigger environmental impact of printing, this mandate has to be even stronger, and reuse targets have to be close to 100 percent.

“We could even anticipate ‘regressive waste taxes’ for good that are used longer and reach their end of life later or are reused. Those goods could be taxed differently compared to products that leave a big gap between their end-of-use (economical) and their end-of-life (technical) or products that are designed for single-use only.”