Sandbag co-signed an open letter sent to the European Commission by 114 leading academics, businesses, civil society organisations and research institutions urging the EU to set explicit and separate targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, land-based carbon...
In this joint op-ed, first featured in Carbon Pulse, Sandbag policy officer Aymeric Amand and Carbon Market Watch policy expert Lidia Tamellini examine the revision of the Free Allocation Regulation. The EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) is one of the core EU...
Sandbag and 12 other organisations – representing important environmental NGOs, think tanks and the European recycling industry – have co-signed a letter addressed to Members of the European Parliament and Members of Coreper 1 in response to the European Commission’s...
Our fact sheet explains why tackling emissions from the European steel sector is so important and why ferrous scrap has a role to play to decarbonise the steel industry.Following the revision of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) Directive in April 2023, the...
The reform of the EU’s carbon market and the free allocation regulation is now voted on. The deal was wrapped in December 2022 and was barely different from what the Commission had proposed nearly two years ago and which we had analysed in September 2021. If the...
Open letter: Free allocation needs to incentivise circularity for the EU to reach net zero To: DG CLIMA - Mr Heiko Kunst Chair of the Expert Group on Climate Change Policy Dear Mr Kunst, We are writing to you on behalf of the European steel scrap recycling...
On 18 April 2023, Sandbag presented to the European Commission’s Expert Group on Climate Change Policy a proposal for reforming the granting of free emission permits to industry under the bloc’s carbon market. Our proposal aims to incentivise the switch to lower...
Sandbag warns that EU carbon market reforms raise ambition but fail to fix structural flaws: free allocation is phased out too slowly, CBAM coverage remains partial, benchmarks still reward polluting processes, and circularity is sidelined-risking inefficiency, distortions, and missed decarbonisation opportunities
This weekend, the European Commission, Parliament, and Council are set to finalise an important reform of the EU’s carbon market in the final round of their “trilogue” (trilogues are informal tripartite meetings on legislative proposals between representatives of the...
A Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) has been proposed by the European Commission as an alternative to the measures under the EU ETS that currently address the risk of carbon-intensive industries relocating to countries with no carbon pricing (carbon leakage),...