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EU Statement – UN General Assembly: High-Level Meeting on Zero Waste in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

30.03.2023
New York
Press and information team of the Delegation to the UN in New York

30 March 2023, New York – European Union Statement at the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly High-Level Meeting on the Role of Zero Waste as a Transformative Solution in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals

Statement by the European Union and its Member States, delivered by EU Ambassador Olof Skoog. The Candidate Countries North Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova aligned themselves with this statement.

 

Mr. President,

Mr. Secretary-General,

Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen,

I have the honour of delivering this statement on behalf of the European Union and its Member States.

  • The EU and its Member States welcome the opportunity to highlight the importance of waste management for achieving the objectives of the 2030 Agenda and addressing the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.
  • We are determined to move from a linear to a climate-neutral, nature-positive and circular economy.
  • The linear growth model of “take-make-use-discard” has reached its limits. With the growth of the world population and consumption, it pushes us closer and closer to a resource crisis.
  • The circular economy, where products and materials are reused, repaired and recycled, rather than thrown away, and in which waste from one industrial process becomes a valued input into another, is the path towards more sustainable use of resources and better waste management.
  • As part of the European Green Deal, the European Union has been developing and implementing a series of circular economy action plans.
  • Our aim is to reduce consumption footprint, double the reuse of material, while considerably reducing waste production.
  • If we want real change, we have to start from design. Design determines up to 80% of a product's lifecycle environmental impact.
  • We should ensure that products are designed to last longer, to be easier to reuse, repair, upgrade and recycle.
  • Circularity is everyone’s agenda.
  • Developing countries are facing a growing waste crisis, which has major consequences for health and the environment.
  • In some countries, waste is primarily managed by the informal sector, through techniques that severely jeopardise the health of workers and cause major environmental and economic harm.
  • Higher-value, employment-generating opportunities for reuse and remanufacturing are yet to be captured. Embedding circular principles in industrial and infrastructural development strategies can help to meet the needs of growing and urbanizing populations, while mitigating against increases in demand and prices of raw material.
  • A concerted collective and global effort is therefore needed to move from a linear to more circular management of waste.
  • As mentioned in objectives of this meeting, we need to ‘promote multi-stakeholder partnerships to scale up the implementation of sustainable consumption, production, and circularity policies and program’.
  • The cross-regional Global Alliance on Circular Economy and Resource Efficiency launched at UNEA-5.1, facilitates sectoral, bilateral and regional partnerships for the resource efficiency transition, with the support of UNEP and UNIDO. We call on more Member States to join the alliance.
  • Mr. President,
  • In closing, we wish to recall that the scope of this High Level meeting, as agreed by consensus in resolution 77/161, intended to ‘promote sustainable consumption and production patterns, including innovative projects and programmes such as local and national “zero waste” initiatives”. We regret that this was not respected in the title and scope of the meeting.
  • At present, we lack a global institutional forum where Sustainable Consumption and Production is addressed in all its facets. We believe that a UN mandated Conference on Sustainable Consumption and Production would bring this critical issue at the forefront of the global agenda.
  • We also wish to recall the statement of the EU and EU Member States of 21 November 2022 that resolution 77/161 should not lead to any duplication, and does not give a mandate to the UN to create a new work track on zero waste that would be separate from existing UN work on the sustainable management of waste and circular economy.
  • I thank you.