Necessary measures to achieve a level-playing field for bio-based products

Over the last three years the STAR4BBI project has studied policy and standardization hurdles that bio-based industries face. During the recent stakeholders’ workshop in Cologne, a set of seven measures to achieve better policy and standards for bio-based industries had been concluded. These will be shared with the EC and industry associations via a soon to be produced report.

The EU funded STAR4BBI project has analysed the policy and standardization hurdles by collecting information from literature and several full product value chains. The partners have developed a set of proposals to legislators and industry to tackle these issues. At the concluding workshop, insights and feedback was provided by industry representatives, standards’ experts and policy makers via interactive table discussions. These helped to confirm and refine the following seven proposals:

1. Develop an EU Renewable Materials Directive similar to the one existing for biofuels and bioenergy
2. Develop sustainability certification of all products under the EU Ecolabel and the CEN standard EN 16751
3. Implement a carbon tax at EU level
4. Regulate at EU and municipal level the design of products and their end-of-life possibilities
5. Update the EU Waste Framework Directive with a harmonized definition of end-of-waste and align it with the Circular Economy Package
6. Make use of compostable plastic mandatory for certain products in order to assist consumers.
7. Update the GMO definition in Directive 2001/18/EC based on the Cartagena Protocol

All these proposals will be presented to the EU policy makers as final results of STAR4BBI. For the public, these results will be available from September 2019, on the project website at the following address: www.biobasedeconomy.eu/projects/star4bbi/

STAR4BBI is an EU funded project focusing on Standards and Regulations for the Bio-based Industry. The project has started on September 2016 with the duration of 36 months. It is led by the Netherlands Standardisation Institute NEN and comprises the consortium members nova-Institute, TU Berlin and Wageningen University.

The project is funded from the Bio Based Industries Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 720685.

Responsible for the content under German press law (V.i.S.d.P.):
Dipl.-Phys. Michael Carus (Managing Director)
nova-Institut GmbH, Chemiepark Knapsack, Industriestraße 300, DE-50354 Hürth (Germany)

Internet: www.nova-institute.eu – all services and studies at www.bio-based.eu
Email: contact@nova-institut.de
Phone: +49 (0) 22 33-48 14 40

nova-Institute is a private and independent research institute, founded in 1994; nova offers research and consultancy with a focus on bio-based and CO₂-based economy in the fields of food and feedstock, techno-economic evaluation, markets, sustainability, dissemination, B2B communication and policy. Every year, nova organises several large conferences on these topics; nova-Institute has 30 employees and an annual turnover of more than 3 million €.