Circular economy, recycling and end-of-waste

Recycling of waste involves secondary resources – materials that may resemble waste – to cease being considered as waste (end-of-waste ; EoW) and to enter the product-sphere. The relevance of this is to which sphere of legislation the certain material belongs. For waste materials, all waste sector-related legislation has to be applied to and for products (non-waste) to which all product-related legislation applies. The transition from waste to product can take place within a process into which the secondary material enters as a waste input. A different option is that the EoW status is achieved prior to a certain process using the respective secondary resource. In that case the secondary material must not only meet certain EoW (i.e. quality specifications) criteria, but also criteria laid out for the marketing of substances and criteria also applicable to any other primary substance, such as the obligations set out in the REACH-Directive.