This included three references to industrial Symbiosis. In order to promote sustainable use of resources and industrial symbiosis, Member States should take appropriate measures to facilitate the recognition as a by-product of a substance or an object resulting from a production process the primary aim of which is not the production of that substance or object if the harmonised conditions established at Union level are respected. The Commission should be empowered to adopt implementing acts in order to establish detailed criteria on the application of the by-product status, prioritising replicable practices of industrial symbiosis.
Those implementing acts shall be adopted in accordance with the examination procedure referred to in Article 39(2). When adopting those implementing acts, the Commission shall take as a starting point the most stringent and environmentally protective of any criteria adopted by Member States in accordance with paragraph 3 of this Article and shall prioritise replicable practices of industrial symbiosis in the development of the detailed criteria.
The long-awaited waste legislation was signed off and appeared in the Journal – the EU’s official gazette of record for new legislation – last Thursday (14 June), following the final ratification of the ambitious set of revised waste directives by the EU Council in May, and will now become law on 4 July. The governments of member states will then have 24 months to transpose the directives into national legislation.
The final ratification came a little over a month after MEPs in the European Parliament gave the set of revised waste directives their seal of approval, ratifying the targets agreed upon following the end of three-way discussions known as trilogues between the European Council, Commission and Parliament back in December, which were then approved by EU ambassadors in February this year. The announcement marks the end of a long journey through the institutions since the Juncker Commission put the current legislation forward in 2015, after withdrawing a draft CEP put forward in July 2014 that included a 70 per cent recycling and reuse target for 2030.
