Packaging industry decries confusing EU recycling rules

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Good morning. Big news: Ukraine would swallow up €186bn of the EU’s common budget if it was a member, according to an internal EU study seen by the Financial Times.

Welcoming Ukraine and eight other aspiring members into the EU would make “many” existing net recipients from the common budget into net payers, end cohesion payments to countries such as the Czech Republic, Estonia and Lithuania, and cut all existing agricultural subsidies by around 20 per cent.

That’s according to a previously unreported study by the EU council, the first institutional research into the cost of enlargement to be revealed. Its findings are stark: “All member states will have to pay more to and receive less from the EU budget,” the study concludes.

In today’s newsletter, our environment correspondent explains the row over new packaging rules, and our man in Budapest reports on the irony of Hungary’s government hailing two new Nobel Prize winners while simultaneously cracking down on academic freedom.

Plastic fantastic

Europe’s packaging industry has warned that slow progress on waste rules could make it even more confusing for consumers to know what to do with their used containers, writes Alice Hancock.

Context: Brussels proposed a far-reaching law to standardise rules on packaging waste last November. It included steep targets for cutting material used and reuse of packaging. The rules are currently winding their way through the EU’s legislative machine.

Industry giants including Unilever, Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Dow Chemical are warning that compromises in the negotiations could mean that EU governments will continue to take their own measures, causing havoc for the EU’s single market.

France and Spain are among those that have banned certain packaging for fruit and vegetables, for example. This means that pan-European supermarket chains have to spend thousands of euros on separate production lines for those countries.

In a letter to Maroš Šefčovič, the commissioner set to head up the EU’s climate laws, the companies said that the rules could create not “one circular economy”, as Brussels had hoped, but “27 mini ones”.

The variety of different packaging labels is also a problem. The French label (a small man with three pointing arrows), for example, is mandatory to help consumers know where to recycle their boxes and bottles.

But Europen, the packaging industry body, estimates that it costs between €1,000 and €2,000 per product for separate artwork to be designed in each country, and existing stock with the wrong label ends up being destroyed.

Meanwhile, negotiations among EU policymakers are the opposite of smooth. A vote on the proposal has already been delayed once in the responsible European parliament committee, and member states are yet to agree their position on the law.

Chart du jour: Housing wobble

Housing prices in the EU have fallen on an annual basis for the first time since 2014, despite a slight recovery in the last three months. Soaring mortgage rates and the rising cost of living have deterred many Europeans from buying a house.

Nobel deeds

This year’s Nobel Prize season has an unlikely champion: Hungary.

Academia in the central European country is usually associated with the government’s campaign to crack down on scientific discovery, but this year Budapest has been infected with Nobel fever, writes Marton Dunai.

Context: A relatively long list of Nobel laureates were born in Hungary. But Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in recent years has subjugated academia, chasing away the top-rated Central European University from the country, and picked political appointees to control universities.

On Monday, Katalin Karikó received the award in medicine alongside American Drew Weissman, for their work on messenger RNA technology, which helped Pfizer and Moderna develop the Covid-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives, with the potential of being used to treat cancer.

And yesterday, Ferenc Krausz, a director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, and his team received the honours for establishing an entire new field based on ultra-short pulses of light, increasing knowledge of subatomic particles.

National pride is off the charts in Hungary, with premier Orbán seemingly forgetting his qualms with academia.

“A Hungarian woman atop the world!” Orbán declared after Karikó’s prize announcement. She is the first Hungarian woman to ever win the award. “From [Hungary] to the top of the world!” he said.

Critics were quick to point out the irony of Orbán’s enthusiasm.

Writer Krisztián Nyáry pointed out only four of the 18 people from Hungary who received Nobels were citizens of the country when they received the prize. And he added: “The number of those who were honoured all along and never chased away from Hungary is zero.”

Both Karikó and Krausz left Hungary in the 1980s, and worked in the US and Germany respectively.

What to watch today

1. Czech president Petr Pavel addresses the European parliament.

2. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Olha Stefanishyna visits Nato headquarters.

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