On 20 March 2019, the Make it Work project and IMPEL together launched ‘Making the Circular Economy Work – Guidance for regulators’ at the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research in Rome.
The guidance aims to support appropriate eco-innovations as one way forward towards sustainable production and a green economy. Regulators often struggle to enable eco-innovations within the current legislative and policy frameworks, because the legislation was not made with eco-innovation in mind. The project has developed a guidance that gives hands-on help to regulators who face challenges posed by eco-innovations in the transition towards the circular economy.
The guidance explains the legislative framework and shows ways of dealing with the difficulties of arriving at end-of-waste or by-product status. This is illustrated with cases from different Member States. Also, the guidance suggests how, through a more strategic and proactive approach, regulators can work with innovative businesses, ensuring protection of the environment and support to the precautionary principle while encouraging technologies that can deliver the sustainable/green production. Regulatory strategies, dialogues with businesses, sectoral roundtables, carefully balanced experiments and pilots, and exchange of information with other regulators, are some of the interventions and instruments that can be used by regulators.
The guidance includes many examples that point out the opportunities within the legislation as well as good practices in some of the Member States. Separate chapters on the roles of policy-makers and businesses are provided together with a specific chapter on plastics.
The guidance is an interactive PDF that is meant not so much for reading from A-Z, but for use!
It can be downloaded here.
Since 2013, IEEP has been supporting the Member State initiative Make it Work and has provided consultancy support. (See also earlier post, listed in the right-hand column). Support for the production of ‘Making the Circular Economy Work – Guidance for regulators’ was provided jointly by IEEP and Foxgloves Consultancy.
For more information please contact:
Dr Andrew Farmer: afarmer@ieep.eu
Ilia Neudecker: ilia@foxgloves.eu
