The European Compost Network (ECN) along with the European Federation of Waste Management and Environmental Services (FEAD) and Municipal Waste Europe (MWE) have published a joint statement highlighting their on-going concerns about proposals in the Fertiliser Regulation. This comes in advance of a discussion on 23rd October in the European Parliament on the CE marked fertilising products proposal. Several amendments to the fertilisers file have been tabled and some of these are still incompatible with the overall objective to increase the use of recycled nutrients.

The joint statement is available here.

The main concerns are about:

• The contradiction of the definition of waste;
• The absence of a defined list of input materials for compost and digestate;
• The proposed limit value for lead (Pb) of 20 mg Pb/kg.

If adopted as such, the report would lead to the exclusion of bio-waste materials for CE marked fertilising products, and thus would position the Parliament against overall Circular Economy goals.

The signatories of the statement call upon the MEPs to consider making the necessary changes to these aspects in the report, in order to fulfil the shared objective of ensuring recycled bio-waste and other secondary raw materials will be part of CE fertilising products.

After the final vote on the Parliament’s report in October it is likely that the inter-institutional discussion between the Commission, the Council and the Parliament will start.

It is important to note that optional harmonisation, which may allow Member States to keep existing End of Waste positions for fertilising products is still included in the proposals. This would enable the UK to keep the existing Quality Protocols and PASs along with the SEPA position statements for composts and digestates.

Published: 10/10/17