"Turn trash into cash". Turning waste into money. This is the renewed obsession of the greenest section of the European Commission. This was expressed by Jessica Roswall, Commissioner for the Environment, at the largest European debate forum on environmental policies, the Green Week, held this week in Brussels. The event, which began in 2010, has shown this year that the European Union is reluctant to give up its climate goals. But it has also shown that a new environmentalism is taking shape in the capital of Europe. One that speaks more of figures, strategic autonomy, and economic competitiveness, and sees waste as a geopolitical asset.
"We do not want to depend on other countries to obtain resources that we do not have, especially now, in the midst of the current geopolitical uncertainty," reaffirmed Roswall, who noted that the EU consumes billions of tons of raw materials each year to fuel its 27 economies. "Much of it comes from our own resources, but many of the most valuable materials come from abroad. Unfortunately, much of it ends up as waste. Only 12% of all materials we use come from recycling," she explained. Europe's goal is to double this figure by 2030, and, most challenging, to do so while its companies regain ground against foreign competitors.
No one in Brussels hid the challenge. The latest Eurostat data reflect that the EU's dependence on material imports, that is, the exposure of the community economy to external purchases, averaged 22% in 2023, the last year with available data. Spain ranks eighth from the bottom, with 42%. Its external dependence is lower than that of similar markets like Italy (48%), but exceeds that of other neighboring countries like Portugal (29.6%) or France (35.3%). Neither our country nor the Twenty-Seven as a whole have managed to reduce their addiction to external imports in the last decade.
Now more than ever, after the commercial storm unleashed by Donald Trump, Europe wants to decouple its growth from exporting countries by giving a second life to its waste, mainly to those containing strategic materials for sectors that underpin the European economy, such as technology, defense, energy, or automotive. Specifically, critical minerals, such as copper, nickel, or rare earth elements, a series of elements whose global processing and refining chain is almost 100% concentrated in China.
In its quest for more autonomy, some of the flagship companies of the European economy are incorporating recycling into their strategic plans. This is the case with Renault. "We were sovereign with the combustion engine because Europe was the mothership, we were the main market, and industry engineers were here since the early 20th century... but this is not the case with the electric vehicle, we are no longer masters of our house," summarized Cléa Martinet, Director of Sustainable Development at the French group.
70% of cobalt is concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, nickel is massively concentrated in Indonesia, and graphite, essential for manufacturing electric car batteries, is refined 90% in China. "Geography does not lie. If Europe wants to regain some independence and resilience, we need those short and closed circuits because we have a huge fleet of electric vehicles in circulation. Therefore, we have huge amounts of minerals in the batteries of our fleets that can be recycled, and we need an industry to do so," she suggested.
"You can always extract more value." This was one of the most repeated mantras at the Green Week in Europe, which since 2010 has brought together high-ranking officials, companies, and NGOs every year to discuss and set the pace for Europe's environmental policies. The message explains well the golden age that the waste business is experiencing.
The money kings spotted the opportunity at the end of the pandemic, when disruptions in global supply chains reminded Europe of its massive external dependence. In 2021, Ferrovial sold its environmental division (waste collection, treatment, and recycling) for more than ¤1.133 billion to PreZero, a company of the German Schwarz group, owner of Lidl. That same year, the Chinese investor China Tianying sold Urbaser, a Spanish waste treatment company, for ¤3.500 billion to the US fund Platinum Equity.
Now, Brussels is giving new impetus by placing waste management at the center of its new green agenda. "A few years ago, no one wanted to talk about waste, now the sector is in vogue," celebrate business sources. The market is the thermometer. The sale of Urbaser has once again made its way into the predictions of major investor funds in 2025. Just four years after its last change of ownership, the bidding has risen to set the sale price of the company at around ¤5.500 billion.
But reality is stubborn. The materials coming out of recycling plants, the fruits of that circular economy that Europe aspires to, are too expensive, much more than virgin raw materials. Why? "Their negative externalities, their environmental impact, are damages that remain outside the EU and are not included in the price paid by the consumer," emphasized Heather Grabbe, Senior Researcher at the Bruegel Institute, the largest Brussels-based think tank, and Visiting Professor at University College London. "Europe must internationalize these externalities by reflecting them in prices because we would achieve more recycling, especially of critical raw materials, which are the most concerning," she concluded.
Grabbe emphasized the commercial opportunities of the circular economy. "The competitive advantage of European companies, where they can truly compete, is in the production of durable and efficient goods and services; not in activities that require intensive resource use, because we do not have them here." But she reminded that beyond making the numbers work, for Europe, this is "an economic security problem." "Much of our economy is based on extracting resources in other parts of the world at levels that already exceed the planet's sustainability capacity. Therefore, the entire economy will be affected if we continue at this pace. Half of the world's GDP, about $50 trillion, directly depends on nature... and the rest depends on it indirectly."
The Commission hopes to improve competitiveness gap against low-cost countries and increase the consumption of recycled products with the future Circular Economy Law. "It will be approved in 2026, and with it, we want to create a single market for circular products and services. These and waste will be able to circulate freely throughout the EU market. It is our opportunity to turn waste into money and waste into wealth. We want to make high-quality recycled materials available to our industries, stimulate the demand for secondary materials and products [recovered or recycled], and simplify procedures to reduce administrative burdens," committed Commissioner Rosewall.
Brussels' commitment to the circular economy implies a warning to the Twenty-Seven. Many member countries continue to be addicted to landfills, including Spain, although this should be the last option in waste management according to the European roadmap.
Europe generated 651 million tons of waste in 2022, according to the latest Eurostat data. It recycled 56.3% of the total, extracting a value from its waste of two euros per kilogram, 2.5 times the global average. These are figures that no other region in the world can boast. But there are also indicators showing that circularity is not taking off in the Old Continent.
The use of materials by the EU economy originating as recycled material has increased very slowly in the last 12 years and has practically stagnated since 2016. It has also not made drastic changes in its material footprint, which is the amount of raw material extracted to fuel an economy. Since 2010, 15 countries have reduced their footprint, including Spain, which, along with the Netherlands, leads the reduction by more than 30%.
The other problem is landfills. In 2020, the EU broke the downward trend of waste deposited in these spaces. Since then, it has been on the rise again. The average landfill rate is 21%. Spain is one of the countries persistently failing to meet waste management targets.
47% of the waste generated by Spaniards ends up in a landfill, far from the European goal of 10%. It also does not meet the municipal waste recycling rate, which stood at 43.2% in 2022. By this year, it should have reached 55%, but Brussels sources doubt that our country has been able to catch up. The Ministry of Ecological Transition attributes the problem to the low volume of municipally collected waste that is separated (22%).
Europe's challenge is for its circularity goals not to undermine its already battered competitiveness. As highlighted in the forum, green materials cannot compete in price with non-green ones. Sources from the industrial sector demand that the recycling recipe includes guarantees that, at least within the community territory, there is no climate dumping. In short, they call on Europe to impose barriers to entry for foreign products that do not meet the same environmental standards. Otherwise, circularity could hinder European companies and worsen their overload of environmental regulations.