Publications

Over the past 10 years, the amount of packaging generated across the EU has increased by almost 18 percent, with around 66 percent of packaging waste being recycled. The revision of the Packaging Directive should therefore primarily help to strengthen waste prevention, the recyclability of packaging and the use of recyclates and further develop information requirements.

Electricity generation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in many countries. Most emissions trading systems (ETS) therefore address emissions from electricity generation. The de-sign of an ETS and the structure and regulation of the electricity sector have a large impact on the environmental effectiveness and the quality of the carbon price signal.

In October 2020, the European Commission launched the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability that calls to counter emerging risk with preventive action. This report aims to place this strategy in the context of the debate on the precautionary principle in the EU and to derive policy options to advance REACH in order to strengthen the control of emerging risk.

A guide of the German Environment Agency (UBA) supports public administrations being a role model of climate protection. To this end, it presents nine stages on the path to greenhouse gas neutral administration. For each stage, it describes the steps and challenges and provides practical recommendations for all relevant issues.

Environmental authorities globally are challenged with the complexity of problems associated with contaminated sites. For protecting human beings and the quality of the environmental media air, water and soil, the prevention and elimination of hazards as well as impact mitigation are crucial.

For REACH a board of appeal (BoA) is established within the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) in order to guarantee processing of appeals for any natural or legal person affected by decisions taken by ECHA. This report summarized the status and the development of the Board of Appeal since REACH entered into force.

The subject of this project was the preparation of substance reports for five substances relevant for building products emissions. For these substances, the toxicological data basis was researched, compiled and evaluated, and EU-LCI values were proposed. The EU-LCI values allow the harmonisation of the health assessment of building products emissions throughout Europe.

Strong algal growth, water turbidity, overfishing, underwater noise or trash not only on the beaches are just a few examples that the North Sea and Baltic Sea are confronted with. The latest status assessment of the German North Sea and Baltic Sea waters from 2018 shows that a good status of marine waters is still a long way off.

To further prevent and reduce the pollution of air, water, and soil and to safeguard human health and well-being, the European regulatory framework needs to be improved to include a cross-regulatory approach.

Climate protection scenarios are an important basis for long-term climate protection planning. The modelling, which is often carried out in extensive studies, is a central source of information for decision makers and stakeholders in the development of climate protection strategies.

The project aimed to improve the European background database used by the Coordination Centre for Effects (CCE) to calculate Critical Loads (CLs) for eutrophication and acidification for (semi-) natural European terrestrial ecosystems. The database is used when member countries do not provide their own CL data to the CCE.

In 2008, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive entered into force, with the overall objective to achieve and/or maintain a good status of the marine environment by 2020. The good environmental status has to be defined in accordance with qualitative Descriptors specified through a Commission Decision.