05/11/2025

The WEEE Forum welcome this ambition and are supportive of initiatives that create a fully integrated, efficient, fair and resilient circular economy, securing the supply of Critical Raw Materials (CRM), stimulating investment, and supporting long-term environmental, economic, and strategic benchmarks.

A true circular economy calls for a robust legal framework centred on inclusive responsibility, clear regulations, coordinated enforcement, and broad societal engagement.

Why a Circular Economy Act now?

On the one hand, prices for secondary raw materials remain higher than for primary ones, and quality often trails behind. Regulations and waste classifications differ among Member States, impeding cross-border flows and creating business uncertainty.

On the other hand, key actors in the value chain fail to collaborate efficiently. Low consumer awareness of products made from secondary raw materials hinder market growth. Public procurement fails to sufficiently incentivise the use of secondary materials.

Among the many actions that we must collectively undertake, the WEEE Forum recommend the following:

• Reshape EPR to include all actors with access to WEEE, create co-ordination bodies and make the WEEE management benchmarks and targets more meaningful and robust.
• Mandate European standards (EN 50625, EN 50614) as official reference.
• Ban cash transactions for metal dealers.
• Harmonise regulations that remove obstacles to transboundary shipments of waste.
• Increase targeted financial mechanisms (grants, subsidies, tax relief) for distinct circularity initiatives.
• Launch EU-wide and national awareness campaigns, co-ordinated centrally, to build public understanding and responsibility.
• Strengthen enforcement (inspection, prosecution and sentencing) to combat illegal and irresponsible WEEE operations and provide capacity-building for competent authorities.
• Require distributors and online platforms to offer free WEEE take-back.
• Mandate compositional analyses of mixed waste streams with a harmonised methodology to better ascertain WEEE flows.
• Rethink the EU’s industrial policy, co-ordinating CRM recovery policies and programmes, and provide support to continued research.
• Foster public procurement policies that promote the goods and services with the lowest negative environmental impact.

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