Recycling, repair, re-use or reducing material consumption through circular business models can provide important additional reductions in greenhouse gas emissions helping to boost Europe’s climate change mitigation efforts, according to a new European Environment Agency (EEA) briefing.

The new EEA briefing found that while European countries are already undertaking many initiatives on waste management and circular economy, they can do more to account for these actions and their potential emissions savings, when reporting on climate policies and measures. This will provide a fuller account of climate change mitigation efforts and make more transparent the mitigation opportunities that can be delivered by bolstering circular economy actions.

Achieving the European Union’s 2050 net-zero climate target will demand greater actions across all economic sectors. This includes actions related to materials and how we produce, use, re-circulate and dispose of them.

The study looks at how European countries can better include circular economy actions (in general) and waste management actions (more specifically) to speed up reductions of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.