Where research evidence, policy design, and city-level implementation meet on secondary raw materials
Each year, tonnes of valuable materials are lost to landfills or incinerated for energy instead of being recovered, reused, repaired or recycled. It is a missed opportunity, for the environment and for Europe’s economy, resilience and competitiveness. In material recovery, challenges exist across EU member states such as inconsistency in quality standards and requirements for embedding recycled content in new products across European member states, among other reasons.
This inconsistency plays out across material streams: from critical raw materials recovered from urban waste to wood waste available for cascade upcycling, to post-consumer plastics seeking re-entry into high-value production cycles. So, the barrier is not just technical but also structural.
Supportive policies that promote material circularity can increase the availability of secondary raw materials, generate demand through policy instruments, such as recycled content mandates and public procurement rules, and, in doing so, provide the right signals to the market needed to justify investment.
On this front, the forthcoming Circular Economy Act (CEA) is a significant opportunity to address this. By establishing a unified regulatory framework for material flows, recycled content obligations, and end-of-waste criteria, the Act has the potential to create the conditions for a genuinely functional Single Market in secondary raw materials. However, the CEA will succeed only if it turns circularity into scalable, investable and operationally viable business models across the Single Market. Across critical raw materials, wood waste, and plastics, this gap between policy intent and market reality is costing Europe both resources and competitive ground.
This webinar brings together research, policy, and city-level implementation perspectives to examine how EU policies can increase the availability and demand for secondary raw materials, especially from wood waste. The objective is to move beyond policy ambition and ask what is actually working on the ground – and what still needs to change to operationalise a true Single Market for secondary raw materials.
- Speaker 1: Nwamaka Ikenze, Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Wood2Wood project
- Speaker 2: Loic Brocard, Recycling Europe
- Speaker 3: Ab Hoogesteger, Gemeente Rotterdam
Date: October 29, Thursday
Time: 11-12 pm CET
Agenda
| Time | Segment | Duration |
| 0:00 | Welcome and framing | 3 min |
| 0:03 | Audience poll | 5min |
| 0:05 | Speaker 1 — CEPS / Wood2Wood | 8 min |
| 0:13 | Speaker 2 — Rotterdam Municipality | 8 min |
| 0:21 | Speaker 3 — Recycling Europe | 8 min |
| 0:29 | Panel discussion — all three speakers | 20 min |
| 0:49 | Audience Q&A | 5min |
| 0:57 | Closing remarks | 3 min |
| 1:00 | End |