The idea behind the EU’s product policy is to support the Union’s wider environmental goals. In this sense, EU products policy is an enabler to help deliver on ambitious climate goals and on aims to reduce raw material use and improve recycling rates and outcomes.

Broadly, these environmental goals can be broken down into climate goals – primarily concerned with reducing CO2 emissions from economic activity, and resource efficiency goals – which is to say the reduction in the total amount of material used in manufacturing and industry.

As it is, the EU’s product policy is not a single piece of legislation. Instead, it is a series of smaller pieces of legislation and accompanying communications setting out overarching objectives and processes. These do not necessarily overlap and apply unevenly to different sectors up and down the value chain.

These vertically and horizontally cross policy fields and whole sectors. For instance, the products policy vertically covers construction and automotive as sectors per se, but also horizontally addresses broad climate, sustainability raw material and circular economy topics.

Each of these channels leads to the same end objective: the greening of the EU economy, with the end result being the transition to a union that is low-CO2, sustainable and minimises virgin raw material use.