Mr. Jean-Pierre Schweitzer:

First, the Senator is sorely missed in Brussels and many people were very happy with her work there. On the material footprint, the point is that the existing indicator, which EUROSTAT asked for and all member states support, is domestic material consumption. Importantly, this misses the embedded materials in imported goods. This is quite a technical point. Most European countries import most of their materials from outside Europe or from other countries. This means that when the overall consumption of natural resources is assessed, this embedded impact is missed and this is quite critical for products like electronics or more or less any manufactured good where there is a kind of trail in the supply chain of moving material. The indicator that covers this most holistically is material footprint and for now, from what I understand, only a few member states are reporting on this. I think there are 11. I understand Ireland is not reporting on it but it is widely agreed to be the best indicator for consumption. A slightly critical point on the indicator is it is quite crude because it refers to tonnes of material and obviously we cannot compare a tonne of sand to a tonne of gold as they have their independent impacts. When we are talking about consumption we need other indicators to support it as well, like impact indicators or the water or land footprint. Thus it can help to give you a good overview of the level of consumption in your economy but it is not a silver bullet.

I want to come back to the question about incentives from Deputy Alan Farrell. I will give one negative example of incentives. In Belgium, we have a system of green vouchers, which encourages people to buy energy-efficient electronics. Some studies on this showed a kind of rebound effect whereby many people were buying green-based credits to buy additional appliances rather than replacing their old ones. In practice they ended up with two refrigerators running rather than one. The example of the rebates in Austria may be more interesting because they focus on reuse. That was just to give an example of how measures might not always work in the way one desires so be wary of how these kinds of incentives are designed.