Glass for Europe has replied to the public consultation launched by the European Commission on the upcoming review of the EU ETS. The EU flat glass sector contributes to the EU’s decarbonisation objectives but does not yet have the breakthrough technologies necessary to drastically reduce its emissions during the manufacturing process.

The flat glass industry is navigating a context of growing production costs in an increasingly competitive global landscape, with the lack of technology remaining the main obstacle to enabling Research and Innovation.

In its position paper, Glass for Europe calls for a rapid design of a new EU ETS framework post-2030, necessary to restore a business case for sustainable flat glass manufacturing in Europe, stating the current EU ETS setting is not fit for 2030 and beyond.

To this end, Glass for Europe formulates five policy recommendations for the future EU ETS phase:

Continued protection against carbon leakage is necessary to provide regulatory certainty.

This support should be channelled through free allocation, with conditionality adequately calibrated and set at a sectoral level.

The revised EU ETS should harmonise compensation of indirect emissions to optimise support to industry facing high energy costs.

The EU ETS should be adapted to be flexible to negative emissions, carbon removals and the use of international credits.

There should be targeted support to Innovation, whereby EU climate policy instruments such as the Innovation Fund, the earmarking of auctioning revenues, and the future Decarbonisation Bank should be conceived as complementary to the EU ETS.

Source: GlassOnline. Summarized by AI