The European Commission has urged the EU to step its efforts to reduce its consumption of primary raw materials from third-world countries, amid fears over growing global resource scarcity. With an environmental footprint that seems to be getting more pronounced as the global population continues to grow, the Commission has published a policy paper to tackle this issue.

The proposal centres around three different courses of action to achieve its goals: it seeks to encourage sustainable extraction of raw materials native to the EU, reducing overall consumption of raw materials globally, and ensuring that there is a level playing-field in terms of accessing raw materials on the global market.

With emerging countries such as China and India providing greater competition for the natural resources of developing countries, there is an added incentive for EU industries to make use of mineral and metal reserves that exist within EU borders.

One potential problem with this however, is that many of the resources are found in protected nature reserves, so the Commission has been keen to address the issue of access to these areas. It has therefore been agreed for guidelines to be published by the end of the year on ‘reconciling extraction activities with environmental protection’, in the words of EU Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen, which will mean a review of the Natura 2000 regulations.

Mr Verheugen is also calling for greater ‘resource diplomacy’, meaning greater collaboration between international partners over resources and concerted multi-lateral efforts to increase recycling and halt illegal exports of ‘end-of-life’ goods such as scrap metal.

Of course the most obvious way to soften the ecological footprint is to reduce our consumption of these materials and the Commission has proposed various methods which it believes can be used to meet this goal. These include greater resource efficiency, more recycling and the substitution and greater use of renewable raw materials in the place of those currently used.

There has been limited reaction to the paper so far, with green groups remaining silent. However MEPs, who earlier in the year called for a significant reduction in extracting of natural resources, will note that the paper does not make any substantial corresponding proposals to curb this process.