Today, Ecommerce Europe co-signs, together with a number of organisations participating in the so-called “Coalition for a digital EU EPR OSS”, a Joint Statement on the need for digitalisation in the forthcoming Circular Economy Act. Digital tools can provide swift bureaucratic relief in regulatory environments where complexity, fragmentation and discrepancies are persistent – as is the Extended Producer Responsibility landscape in the EU.
The co-signatories urge the European Commission to use the Circular Economy Act proposal to put forward measures fostering the digitalisation of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes, including the set-up of a digital, EU-wide One-Stop Shop for EPR.
In our current understanding, a digital EU EPR OSS is a single digital platform (or ‘point of entry’) for all mandated EPR schemes in the EU, allowing:
- The input of EPR-relevant data by producers (and/ or other actors acting on their behalf) making available products subject to EPR schemes in up to 27 Member States, and
- The pulling of that data, after its validation and harmonisation through translation, by PROs and Member States’ registers and authorities.
In other words, an OSS enables a seamless exchange of compliance information between operators subject to EPR compliance obligations, on the one hand, and organisations and authorities implementing EPR, on the other.
The organisations taking part in the Coalition are committed to delivering concrete recommendations to the European Commission regarding the essential features of the OSS in a timely manner. We are also determined to help secure a broad uptake of the OSS, namely by making it user-friendly and voluntary for a diverse range of companies and business models.
Read the joint statement here.