Position Papers

As consumers are increasingly aware of the textiles sector’s negative impact on the environment, they expect their clothes to last longer. Almost six in 10 Europeans are willing to pay more for products that are easier to repair, recyclable and/or produced in a sustainable way. This is why sustainable clothing should become the norm for consumers while being affordable for everyone.

The EU set the goal of making sustainable textiles the norm by 2030 in its Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles and, currently, the European Commission is developing a proposal to introduce minimum performance and information requirements for textiles entering the EU market. This proposal will be in the form of a delegated act under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation.

In this paper, BEUC sets out its key recommendations, focusing on longer-lasting textiles, safe and sustainable design, improved circularity and meaningful information.

Consumer-friendly charging is instrumental for the mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). As well as binding deployment targets for public charging infrastructure, the EU’s Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR) includes important requirements on price transparency and payment methods.

However, despite these requirements, public charging across Europe still has structural problems that undermine consumer trust: an opaque, multi-layered pricing system hindering comparison, billing complexity that makes costs impossible to predict, local monopolies and payment methods that remain inaccessible to many.

BEUC calls on the European Commission and co-legislators to close AFIR regulatory gaps and address the underlying market failures, including market concentration, that keep public charging expensive and difficult to use.