While the subject is on the agenda in the European Parliament, Pascal Canfin targets, for example, cardboard boxes for toothpaste in tubes or filmed cucumbers and denounces the resistance of certain brands.
“If we want to be carbon neutral, if we want to be more sovereign, more independent, this means reducing unnecessary plastic,” defended Renew MEP and president of the parliamentary Environment committee Pascal Canfin on Tuesday October 24 on franceinfo, while MEPs are considering a text aimed at greening packaging in the EU. At a time when Europeans have never generated so much packaging waste, 188.7 kilos per inhabitant in 2021, a jump of 11 kilos in one year and 32 kilos in a decade, according to figures from Eurostat, “the challenge is to set rules” to forbid “totally superfluous packaging”.
franceinfo: what are the issues at stake in the debate in the environment committee of the European Parliament?
Pascal Canfin: We want to significantly reduce the volume of our waste. We set ourselves medium-term objectives to reduce them by at least a quarter, for example for plastics. The challenge is therefore to set rules which ensure that we start with completely unnecessary packaging.
However, a lot of packaging is essential to ensure a sufficient level of safety and hygiene?
We are not going to reduce 100% of packaging. We’ll start with those that are superfluous. For example, the tube of toothpaste is in tightly closed plastic with a capsule on top and yet there is still cardboard around it. This one is absolutely useless. Here we also propose to do without cardboard and obviously to keep the plastic for obvious reasons of safety and hygiene. Another example: cucumber. In the supermarkets you still have cucumbers with plastic film around them, while you have other cucumbers with just a small net made of cardboard, paper, or nothing at all. So it’s doable, it doesn’t change the quality of the cucumber and therefore we can remove this plastic film. Here are dozens and dozens of examples of things that are useless and which produce waste that we unfortunately do not know what to do with today and that are sometimes exported to the ends of the world in deplorable conditions.
Should we make a distinction between useful and useless packaging?
Basically, there is a hierarchy: when packaging is totally substitutable, useless, our objective is simply to do without it, which is the best way to not produce pollution behind it. On the other hand, there is packaging which is perfectly useful, which responds to a concrete lifestyle issue, water bottles for children, packaging around cakes, etc. The objective is not to eliminate this packaging. On the other hand, my goal is to ensure that they are 100% recyclable and recycled.
“One of the objectives of the directive is to move towards an economy that is not only more sober but also circular.”
Pascal Canfin, MEPat franceinfo
In other words, with the rate of recycled materials for water bottles, milk bottles, for water bottles, for example, which will gradually increase so that we put everyone in a circular loop. In this way, we will be more independent from plastic, a material that we manufacture and import. I remind you that behind plastic, there is oil. And so, if we want to be carbon neutral, if we want to be more sovereign, more independent, this also involves reducing unnecessary plastic.
This packaging restriction examined on Tuesday by the European Parliament is the subject of intense resistance from manufacturers. How do you explain it?
It’s lobbying. You have companies that are totally in support of this fight that we are waging collectively for our environment like Ikea, Carrefour which go even further than the law and I encourage them and I congratulate them. And then you have companies that do everything to prevent us from passing this text like McDonald’s, KFC or Dunkin’ Donuts whose model is based on all plastic and all disposables.
In France, have these fast food brands made efforts with the anti-waste law for a circular economy (Agec) passed in February 2020?
France is probably the country in Europe, and probably even in the world, which has the supervision and practices which are beginning to become the most virtuous. You know that in fast food restaurants you have more and more reusable dishes and no longer disposable ones when you eat there, which, ultimately, comes down to common sense. Now, what we want is to change the scale, to do it on a continent-wide scale, but we have frantic lobbying from these fast food brands to stay on their all-disposable, all-plastic model. And I hope that today we will win this fight.