Pursuing the objectives of the European Green Deal in a Clean Industrial Deal, create a new law on the circular economy to intensify the use of secondary raw materials and optimize public procurement.
The FEhS Building Materials Institute considers the planned measures in the EU Commission’s Political Guidelines 2024-2029 to be trendsetting. In many respects, they are in line with the FEhS Institute’s core demands for sustainable resource management and the key points of a legal opinion on the EU Public Procurement Directive commissioned by the FEhS Institute and the European association EUROSLAG in 2020.
The legal opinion on the EU Public Procurement Directive calls for specifications for a circular public procurement system, such as the comprehensive approval of secondary building materials and their conditional preference in public procurement. Among other things, the fundamental importance of environmental criteria in the award of public contracts should be enshrined, “aspects of environmental protection, the circular economy and resource conservation” should be mandatory in the specification of services and the non-approval of secondary materials should be justified in the contract award notices.
Thomas Reiche, Managing Director of the FEhS Institute and Chairman of EUROSLAG: “We are optimistic about the guidelines presented by the EU Commission. This is considerable progress compared to 2020, when the objectives formulated in our report were not heard by the EU Commission. We are working with our partners at all levels to ensure that these plans are put into practice.”
The FEhS Institute has been campaigning for many years at the political interfaces for improved framework conditions and the sustainable use of products containing slag. Building materials and fertilizers from the steel industry have been making an important contribution to the conservation of natural resources for many decades. In the period from 2000 to 2023 alone, the use ferrous slag avoided the extraction of around 1.2 billion tons of natural rock across Europe.
