"FIEC broadly welcomes the new Circular Economy Action Plan, which builds on the previous plan and includes the use of guidelines and tools that have been developed over the last two years, with FIEC’s involvement in partnership with the European Commission and other stakeholders.” says FIEC’s Technical Commission President José-Michaël Chenu.

“In particular, we welcome the forthcoming Strategy for a Sustainable Built Environment and the measures aimed at stimulating a market for secondary materials” he continues.

The new Circular Economy Action Plan links carbon neutrality, resource efficiency and circularity and aims to address these in a coherent way via a sustainable product policy legislative initiative. While FIEC welcomes any attempts to ensure coherence and overlap, the one concern that the federation has at this early stage is how the Commission will ensure compatibility and avoid duplication between the extended Ecodesign Directive, Ecolabel and the Construction Products Regulation, due to be revised in this political term.

“It is clear that our position on regulation of construction materials remains unchanged. Such regulation must fall under the scope of the Construction Products Regulation and we cannot be subject to additional measures that aim to achieve the same thing via different regulations” says Chenu. “This also applies to secondary materials” he adds.

FIEC is particularly pleased to see that the EU institutions intend to tackle barriers to circularity. Concluding, Chenu says “In order to help the EU achieve the ambitious aims of its new plan, we need support to ensure that recycling facilities are upgraded accordingly and that a real effort is made now to accelerate the development of standards that will create more certainty over the use of secondary materials in construction.”

FIEC is the European Construction Industry Federation, representing via its 32 National Member Federations in 28 countries (25 EU & Norway, Ukraine, Turkey) construction enterprises of all sizes, i.e. small and medium-sized enterprises as well as “global players”, carrying out all forms of building and civil engineering activities.