A new and powerful wave of “greenwashing” bans will sweep the European Union (EU) shortly. The EU’s Green Claims Directive and Greenwashing Directive (together, the Green Directives) are key legislative tools being introduced in the EU as part of the European Green Deal, focused on combatting misleading claims regarding products’ environmental friendliness or social consciousness.
BACKGROUND TO THE GREEN DIRECTIVES
The European Commission’s (the Commission) aim is to reduce “greenwashing” claims across the EU market and provide consumers more generally with accurate information when making their purchasing decisions. The Commission has noted that many environmental claims made by brands trading in Europe are currently not reliable and that consumer trust in them is extremely low. Indeed, a Commission study published in 2022 identified that 56% of EU consumers stated that they had encountered misleading environmental claims.
Currently, EU law does not specifically regulate environmental claims, but they are subject to a generic set of rules under consumer laws, which state that marketing claims should not be misleading, inaccurate or untruthful, among other requirements. The current obligations are set under the Misleading and Comparative Advertising Directive 2006/114/EC, the Unfair Business-to-Consumer Practices Directive 2005/29/EC and the Consumer Rights Directive 2011/83/EU.
The Greenwashing Directive focuses on creating a common methodology for substantiating green claims and making information on claims readily available to consumers.
The Green Claims Directive provides an outright ban on generic environmental claims, imposes stringent environmental labelling requirements and introduces obligations on brands to provide clear and relevant information concerning environmental or social claims.
The EU parliament itself is guilty of its own form of greenwashing. According to EU rules, burning wood for electricity is considered carbon neutral. In reality, chopping down forests and burning the wood produces a large amount of CO2. This is especially true when the wood being burned in Europe comes from trees grown in North America, Asia, or wherever they can find the wood.
It is not difficult to see why they want to keep wood classified as “green”. A power plant that burns wood chips (such as Drax in the UK), is a reliable and dispatchable source of electricity. Such power plants are needed, because of the inherent unreliability of wind and solar power. The EU members need the power from the wood burners, so they need to write the rules in order to make wood combustion appear to be climate friendly.
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Even with these rules, the EU still isn’t meeting its ambitious target of getting to net zero by 2050.
It’s also because Europe has Parliamentary systems and sometimes the “green party” gets enough votes to become the party that decides who is in power. In return they get certain concessions. For example, in Germany the green party was needed to form a coalition and because of that they eliminated most nuclear power in favor of keeping coal plants burning for longer than they would have otherwise run. Farmers are also still a potent political force in parts of Europe (remember the massive protests last year) and their interests also sometimes result in unexpected non-green things happening. And the USA isn’t immune to the phenomenon, though it happens somewhat differently in the USA, a perfect example is ethanol mandates which helps farmers in agricultural states and despite being less efficient overall, still exists because almost all legislation needs the senators from agricultural states to vote for passage.
Not “most” nuclear power. All of the German nuclear power plants were forced to permanently shut down. Over this past weekend, they blew up the cooling towers at one of those plants.
No wonder that China and India continue to build coal-fired power plants in large numbers, and continue to burn more and more tons of coal every year (not to mention the increasing amounts of oil and natural gas). The Chinese and Indians don’t see a good reason to seriously hurt their economies, if the US and EU can’t get their acts together.
From the link: “Countries in the European Union (EU) burned about 23.1 million tonnes of wood pellets in 2021.It is expected that their consumption in 2022 will reach more than 24 million tonnes and increase even more in the future due to soaring fossil fuel prices and increased demand by individual households.”
So not all of the wood burning goes for electricity. It is common for northern Europeans to heat their homes and cook their meals with wood. From the ref. you provided:
04 November 2022
For many people in economically well-developed countries of the UNECE region a wood stove or fireplace used to be a cosy way to heat a room in the cold season. This winter, however, the role of wood energy may dramatically change for many people out of sheer necessity.
A large part of the UNECE region is increasingly exposed to highly volatile prices of heating oil, natural gas and coal, forcing vulnerable groups of the population to switch back from gas and electricity for heating and cooking to often inefficient and heavily polluting wood stoves.
Several EU wood burning power plants listed in the following:
From the link: Significant new base-load demand in 2020 will come from the Netherlands, where four substantial biomass co-firing projects began firing in the past year. The plants — RWE’s 630MW Amer 9, its two 777MW Eemshaven units A and B, Uniper’s 1.1GW Maasvlakte 3 and Onyx Power’s 731MW Rotterdam plant — are all ramping up wood pellet co-firing percentages. Their demand alone will total around 3.4mn t/yr at full capacity.
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If they say they are only burning wood waste (leaves, bark, small branches, etc), I would be highly skeptical of such claims. There are several documented cases where whole logs were found as the supply for the wood chippers and pellet makers.
I would be surprised if there were no larger logs branches!
Just look around after any large wind event!
Large limbs broken off. Trees uprooted, split or broken off.
Saw mills will not normally accept trees from urban areas because of the risk of embedded metal. Seems people in cities like to put basketball hoops, hammocks, signs and a lot of other things on trees.
The cost of replacing a set of bits or the carrier (the big disc) for an older saw mill is quite prohibitive. Even the newer, band saw mills do not want to saw any tree with possible steel in it.
Every log I took to our local mill had to be “certified” by me as not being a fence-line tree or a “yard” tree.
