ICER 2023: Dutch circular goals still far out of reach

Little progress has been made in recent years towards achieving a fully circular economy in the Netherlands by 2050. If Dutch cabinet targets are still to be met, concludes the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) in its biennial Integrated Circular Economy Report (ICER), more binding policies are needed. It is crucial that products are designed to allow for high-quality recycling, longer-term use and less use of new raw materials. The report also finds that the Dutch government's choice of differentiated policies by product group is a step in the right direction. 

The ICER 2023 was produced in cooperation with a broad consortium including researchers from Utrecht University. A series of six individual reports put together by the Copernicus Institute’s Sanne Bours, Remi Elzinga, Marko Hekkert (since January 1 also director of PBL), Vivian Tunn and Simona Negro analysed plastic packaging, bio-plastics, infrastructure, laptops and smartphones, electric vehicle batteries, and covenants from a mission-oriented innovation perspective, the results of which fed into the wider ICER report. Vivian Tunn also contributed to the Material Flow Monitor, which was used to develop circularity indicators included in the report.

Key insights from the ICER 2023 report
 

1. A mismatch between ambitious goals and deployed policies
   Current policy focuses mainly on voluntary agreements, such as the Plastic Pact and support for experimental projects. This is relevant, but not sufficient to realise a transition that makes resource use radically more efficient. This requires rules of the game that firmly steers towards less, longer and repeated use of raw materials and products.
    

2. Several trends in raw material use going in the wrong direction
   With current policies and the resulting trends, the government will not achieve its target of halving abiotic raw material use by 2030. The quantities of incinerated and landfilled waste in the Netherlands have increased. Supply risks of critical raw materials have also increased for the Dutch economy, impacting the electronics and renewable energy technology. In addition, plastic packaging has increased in recent years, and the useful life of furniture and garments has decreased.
    

3. Steering more towards high-quality utilisation of raw materials 
   A circular economy aims for substantially less and radically more efficient use of raw materials. The Netherlands is a European leader in terms of recycling, but as material streams are not separated properly, a large amount of waste is still incinerated or used in low-grade applications such as roadside bollards. Because the Netherlands focuses on the quantity of collected waste there is no incentive to keep waste streams as pure as possible and to recycle them into a high value product. Steering policy by product group can support high-quality recycling.
    

4. High-quality recycling improves security of supply
   Raw material supply is a geopolitical Achilles heel for Europe, and security of supply has been high on the political agenda since the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Effective circular policies can contribute to this by recovering strategic raw materials from the existing stock of products and buildings and making them available for future use. At present, this rarely succeeds. Moreover, products today are often not designed with future recovery of materials for high-value applications in mind, risking losing this potential raw material buffer. Radically more efficient resource use would improve Europe's security of supply, and circular product design is a prerequisite for future availability of secondary materials. In addition, new mining in Europe will be needed to have sufficient raw materials available for the energy transition.
    

5. Circularity connects a range of environmental problems
   Global raw material use has tripled over the past 50 years and will double again by 2060 without a change of course. Policies for a circular economy kill several birds with one stone, as climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental pollution are closely intertwined with resource use. For example, raw material extraction and processing accounts for half of global greenhouse gas emissions, almost a third of particulate matter emissions and 90% of water scarcity and biodiversity loss on land.