Each year, tonnes of valuable materials are lost to landfills or incinerated for energy instead of being recovered, reused, repaired or recycled. It is a missed opportunity, for the environment and for Europe’s economy, resilience and competitiveness.

Member States have varying quality standards and requirements for embedding recycled content in new products. This inconsistency plays out across material streams: from critical raw materials recovered from urban waste to wood waste available for cascade upcycling, to post-consumer plastics seeking re-entry into high-value production cycles. 

Supportive policies that promote material circularity can increase the availability of secondary raw materials, generate demand through policy instruments, such as recycled content mandates and public procurement rules, and thus send market signals triggering investment.

The forthcoming Circular Economy Act (CEA) is a significant opportunity to address this issue. By establishing a unified regulatory framework for material flows, recycled content obligations and end-of-waste criteria, the Act has the potential to lay the groundwork for a genuine single market in secondary raw materials. However, it will only succeed if it turns circularity into scalable, investable and operationally viable business models across the single market.

This webinar is organised by Wood2Wood, a Horizon Europe project tackling the potential future shortage of wood for buildings and products due to traditional waste management practices and contaminated wood waste being tricky to recycle.

It brings together research, policy and municipal perspectives to examine how EU policies can increase the availability of and demand for secondary raw materials, especially from wood waste. The objective is to move beyond policy ambition and ask what is actually working on the ground - and what still needs to change to deliver a true single market for secondary raw materials.

This webinar will take place at 11:00-12:00 CEST on 29 October. Register here.