Circular Economy Act, the Commission’s flagship attempt to reduce Europe’s dependence on imported raw materials, has slipped from the third quarter of 2026 to November, and the reason is procedural rather than political. The Regulatory Scrutiny Board returned a negative opinion on the impact assessment, which means the Commission must substantially revise the analysis and resubmit it before the proposal can be published at all.
The Board is an internal body, staffed partly by Commission officials and partly by outside experts, and its function is to check whether a proposal’s evidence base supports its conclusions. A negative opinion is not a veto. It is a requirement to go back and do the work again, and it is issued often enough that Brussels practitioners treat it as a routine hazard rather than a scandal — the REACH chemicals revision is currently stuck at the same gate. But the delay is not costless, because the Act was meant to be a central pillar of the Clean Industrial Deal and its timetable was already tight. Adoption was foreseen for the third quarter of 2027, which assumed publication a year earlier.
The substance explains why the assessment was hard to write. The Act is built on three pillars: amendments to the Waste Framework Directive and the Landfill Directive, amendments to the directive governing electrical and electronic waste, and a set of horizontal measures aimed at the single market for secondary materials. Its headline target is to roughly double the Union’s circular material use rate to around 24 per cent by 2030 — a figure that describes what share of material fed into the economy comes from recycling rather than extraction.
Quantifying that is genuinely difficult. The barrier the Act is designed to remove is fragmentation in extended producer responsibility schemes, where twenty-seven national systems apply different fee structures, different definitions of what counts as recyclable, and different reporting obligations to the same product sold across the same single market. Estimating the cost of that fragmentation requires data that is held by national schemes in incompatible formats, and estimating the benefit of removing it requires assumptions about how quickly secondary material markets would deepen if the rules converged. Neither number is easy to defend to a scrutiny board, and it is plausible that this is precisely what the Board objected to.
The delay matters for packaging and electronics most of all. Producers have been planning around a framework that would set common rules for how packaging is designed, collected and recycled, and a shift from Q3 to November compresses the time available before the 2030 target date without moving the target. Every month lost in drafting is a month that must be recovered in transposition, and transposition of waste directives has historically been the slowest part of Union environmental law.
There is a case that the Board is doing its job. Circular economy legislation has a long record of targets adopted on political momentum and missed on physical reality: recycling rates that counted material sent for recycling rather than actually recycled, collection obligations that outran sorting capacity. A doubling of the circular material use rate in four years is the kind of commitment that deserves a rigorous evidence base rather than a rapid one, and a proposal published in November with defensible numbers is worth more than one published in September that collapses under Parliamentary scrutiny.
The risk is the opposite one. Impact assessments returned for redrafting tend to come back with more modest claims, and more modest claims tend to justify more modest instruments. The version that emerges in November may well be the version the Board’s arithmetic can support, which is not necessarily the version the 2030 target requires.
