Mr President, I am very pleased to be here today for more than one reason because, looking around the room, perhaps I am one of the few people who was actually here when we first wrote the packaging directive. I feel a special responsibility to ensure that we do not forget that and ensure that this directive continues to develop in a positive way for the environment. I welcome this proposal but I am not sure whether the timing is particularly good, coming as it does from the Commission before we can fully assess the impact of enlargement. I think that we have to be sure that what we do to the directive on this occasion is a positive and sensible thing and we do not, for example, try to table ego-amendments rather than eco-amendments. Politicians always tend to want to change directives and demonstrate their power. What we have to do today is take a rather more limited approach than we took with the first packaging directives of many years ago. But I see this as a useful opportunity, if we can take that approach, to adjust the directive in the light of experience. We have learned that recycling is not in itself a good thing but only good when it is positive and beneficial to the environment. Therefore, many of the tools that we have gradually developed need further refinement, whether life-cycle analysis or some of the other tools. These will tell us the real value of the work that we are doing and that we are asking others to do. Simply raising the targets without any thoughtful consideration of them is not something that we should do on this occasion. Let us take the Commission targets, which are not bad targets at all – the Commission proposal is not a bad proposal at all – let us examine them carefully and let us refine them. Let us see if we can improve them. Perhaps minimum targets for each material is not a bad idea. There are some materials that do indeed need a lot more work on them, or if you look at the area of glass and metal perhaps less work. We need to think very carefully about this directive. We must ensure that it is acceptable not just to those countries that are already and fully implementing the packaging directive but also to those that will have to implement it in coming times. We must bear in mind, of course, the very different situation countries like Malta will find themselves in. Smaller countries with particularly difficult waste disposal problems cannot really be realistically expected to adhere to exactly the same levels of recycling that might be achievable in the Netherlands. We are also talking about Central and Eastern Europe and that is why I wonder whether we should not pause for a little thought before we push too far ahead with a radical revision of this proposal. Circumstances and conditions in those countries that will shortly be members of the European Union will dictate that we take a different approach to some of the legislation. In particular when it comes to packaging, there has to be some kind of uniform and level playing field across Europe, in which case we have to be realistic about what is achievable in central and eastern Europe in the foreseeable future. Finally, I would say that when we sit down today, I hope we will perhaps feel satisfied and happy and have a warm glow inside us, but also feel that we have done something not just for our egos but for the environment.

Political group: PSE