The EU has been taking significant steps to ensure that its market, and goods produced and sold in its territory, become more sustainable, safe and green. While still insufficient, various pieces of legislation have been adopted or updated in the past years to try to address and reduce the impacts that some production methods or goods have on the health and human rights of EU consumers, and on animals and the environment throughout the EU.

Yet at the same time, the EU’s internal market is dependent on a global trade economy which – as it is currently shaped – is based on an ecologically unequal exchange, whereby lower income countries have become net exporters of biophysical resources, such as raw materials, energy, land, and labour, to high income nations like the EU’s member states. 

Many EU standards apply generally only with regard to the “placing on the EU market”, which is a term that excludes a product manufactured in an EU Member State with a view to exporting it to a non-EU country. This means that European companies are allowed to sell outside the EU territory polluting goods, such as highly hazardous pesticides, certain single-use plastics, unsafe toys and other products, which are still being produced in the EU but forbidden for sale or placing on the market within the region.

This briefing paper, supported by more than 100 non-governmental organisations, including Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the Fair Trade Advocacy Office, documents how these trade loopholes appear in current and proposed EU laws.

The endorsing organisations call on the European Union to close what they call “hypocritical, cruel, unfair and intolerable” loopholes which allow companies in the EU to export products to other parts of the world even when those products have been banned in Europe for safety reasons.

Read the full briefing paper here.