Brussels/Frankfurt, 3 September 2021 – Commenting on the EU Commission's considerations to extend the scope of the EU taxonomy VDMA Executive Director Thilo Brodtmann comments:

"It is right to develop a standard for the financial industry to determine green investments. Avoiding greenwashing in financial products is an objective of the EU taxonomy that we strongly support. Mechanical engineering in particular, as a central industrial sector that enables sustainable transformation with its technologies, will also need access to financing in the future. However, the current taxonomy is already so complex that mechanical engineering companies in particular can hardly implement it in practice. Extending the taxonomy to include social criteria and also creating a list for 'significantly harmful' activities goes too far and is counterproductive.

There are already many European regulations in the social field, such as the revision of the CSR Directive. An additional social taxonomy would lead to duplication of regulation and an enormous additional bureaucratic burden for companies. The policy also overshoots the mark with the idea of categorising economic activities into good and bad. The taxonomy should create incentives to invest in sustainable technologies and not stigmatise certain technologies as harmful on the basis of questionable criteria. The EU should therefore immediately discard such considerations and rather work on improving the competitive situation of the industry instead of putting new hurdles in its way."