EXPRA Member CONAI receives Circular Economy award
Brussels, 24 April 2017. Consorzio Nazionale Imballaggi (CONAI), the Italian consortium in charge of implementing the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), and EXPRA member, was recognised today among ‘100 Italian Circular Economy champions’. The award was formalised at an event organised by the Italian non-profit association Legambiente in the European Parliament, in the presence of European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen, and European Parliament’s Rapporteur for the waste proposals, Simona Bonafè.
CONAI is being rewarded for its role in implementing the circular economy model in Italy – as the national packaging consortium, it is responsible for recovering and recycling packaging waste involving steel, aluminum, paper, wood, plastic and glass. In 2015, recycling accounted for 66.9 per cent of the total packaging consumption, amounting to 8.2 million tonnes. Considering energy recovery rates, 78.6 per cent of the packaging waste (9.6 million tonnes) was, in fact, diverted from landfill.
These results paved the way for secondary raw materials equivalent to 3 billion glass 0.75-litre bottles, 329 million A4 paper reams, 32 million wood pallets, 9 billion plastic detergent bottles, 1 billion 33cl aluminum cans, and steel for 725 high speed Freccia-rossa trains. In turn, the circular economy model was boosted through tangible environmental, economic and social benefits.
EXPRA’s Managing Director, Joachim Quoden, commented: “We are proud to witness this recognition for CONAI. Over the years, our Italian member has showcased the absolute relevance of industry-driven EPR applied from a public service perspective, and been an innovation frontrunner. EPR is an enabler of the circular economy, and its role should therefore be acknowledged and safeguarded by policy”.
Walter Facciotto, CONAI’s General Manager, stated: “We are delighted to join Legambiente in Brussels to demonstrate the importance of recycling packaging waste, which has been a priority in Italy for over twenty years. Thanks to CONAI’s strong partnership with private enterprises, more than two-thirds of consumer packaging is now being removed from landfill. This is the result of a model that shares responsibilities and obligations for packaging end-of-life between producers, users, municipalities and consumers”.
About EXPRA
Founded in 2013, EXPRA is the Extended Producer Responsibility Alliance – the organisation for packaging and packaging waste recovery and recycling systems which are owned by the obliged industry and work on a not-for-profit or profit not for distribution basis. EXPRA acts as the authoritative voice and common policy platform representing the interests of its members, which are all founded and run by or on behalf of the obliged industry. Over the past 20 years, our 25 members across 23 countries, including 17 EU Member States, have co-organised the collection, sorting and recycling of used packaging (with a focus on household packaging) on behalf of the obliged industry. In so doing, they fulfil their legal take-back and recycling obligations, serving over 200 million inhabitants and recycling over 18 million tons of packaging per year. For more information, please visit www.expra.eu. For more information, please visit www.expra.eu
About CONAI
CONAI is a not-for-profit, private consortium that brings together more than 900,000 packaging producers and users with the aim of meeting the legal recovery and recycling targets for packaging materials. The consortium aims at safeguarding the public interest by protecting the environment. In so doing, it applies the ‘shared responsibility’ principle amongst businesses, the public administration and citizens across packaging’s production, management and end-of-life treatment. CONAI steers the activity of other six consortiums that are responsible for recycling the following materials: Steel (Ricrea), Aluminum (Cial), Paper (Comieco), Wood (Rilegno), Plastic (Corepla), and Glass (Coreve). For more information, please visit www.conai.org
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