NEWS
EESC: stop unfair competition and provide incentives for fleet renewal
Unacea: an important recognition of the issues often underlined by the construction equipment industry
Combat the unfair competition that threatens the construction equipment industry and introduce incentives for the renewal of the fleet in order to preserve the environment. These are some of the recommendations of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) contained in the document "Agricultural machinery, construction and handling equipment: what is the best way out of the crisis?".
According to the EESC – a consultative body that advises the European Commission, Council and Parliament acting as a bridge between the EU institutions and the so-called "organised civil society" (trade, environmental and consumers' associations, trade unions, NGOs, etc.) – the importation, marketing and use of non-compliant machines on the EU market represent for the European construction industry a very serious problem that compromises the firms' ability to undertake R&D activities and threatens to reduce employment volumes. "Non-compliant machines – according to the document – are more likely to cause accidents and they frequently fail to meet the environmental standards demanded by the EU." Moreover, the national authorities that should supervise the market "lack the means and resources to tackle this situation, while legislation is not always clear in its defence of legal products. More and more non-compliant machines are illegally placed on the EU market without any effective action by market surveillance and customs authorities, although stricter legislation entered into force on 1st January 2010 (Regulation 765/2008)."
Another point highlighted by the EESC concerns the measures needed to adequately safeguard the environment: "before considering developing more stringent or new legislation applying to the same products, an impact assessment should be undertaken at EU level, taking account of the possible negative consequences for the industry's competitiveness on a global market and the possible marginal improvements in practice for these machines."
The irrelevance of the improvements is due to the fact that most old and polluting machines are kept in operation. In order to solve this problem, the Committee recommends that a scrapping scheme for fleet renewal be introduced and that the additional flexibility provisions concerning the emissions directive be adopted as quickly as possible. This is the European Commission's proposal to extend until 2013 the flexibility of the number of previous stage engines that can be installed on construction machines.
"It is very important – declares Franco Invernizzi (New Holland Construction – Fiat Industrial), Unacea vicepresident – that the main recommendations of an official European body such as EESC address the problems of unfair competition and of a new approach to environmental preservation based on the reduction of the number of old and polluting machines rather than on the introduction of new regulations which do not always really reduce the volume of polluting emissions. These are urgent problems, which the Italian and European construction industries have been pointing out to policy makers for a long time."