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The EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles announced the review of the Textile Labelling Regulation. As part of this review, the Strategy mentions the possibility to introduce mandatory disclosure of types of information other than those already included in the current Regulation, such as sustainability and circularity parameters, products’ size and, where applicable, the country where manufacturing processes take place (‘made in’). The opinion will explore the different options to expand the scope of the Textile Labelling Regulation, including parameters on sustainability and circularity in coherence with current legislative proposals linked to traceability.
This exploratory opinion will be an opportunity to follow up on the EESC work on sustainable food systems, address the causes of obesity as the social determinant of health and provide recommendations for promoting healthier and sustainable diets, healthy lifestyle habits and protection of vulnerable children to feed into the work of the Spanish presidency.
In its 2023 Work Programme, the European Commission announced a proposal for a second basket of new own resources, building inter alia on the proposal for a single set of tax rules for doing business in Europe (BEFIT). The aim of these measures will be to ensure more diversified and resilient types of revenue and avoid undue cuts to Union programmes or excessive increases in Member State contributions, in view of repaying the grant component of the NextGenerationEU recovery plan.
In view of the upcoming proposal that will be published in the third quarter of 2023, the European Commission requested the European Economic and Social Committee to provide an exploratory opinion on this subject in order to feed into the preparation of the Commission proposal.
The main objective of this opinion is to deliver, eight years after its official launch, an EESC assessment of the state of play of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a soft-power tool through which China has assumed a new strategic geopolitical position on the world chessboard. In this context, the EESC needs to investigate what impact the BRI can have on the EU's policies such as twin transition, open strategic autonomy, access to critical technologies and critical raw materials, security and defence, TEN-T network, foreign direct investments, EU screening, etc.