Articles under section " Dossier: Supporting the Green Transition "

The WCO is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year and is taking this opportunity to look back at what it has achieved as well as at ways of responding to current challenges. One pressing issue is how to support the transition to a climate-neutral economy. At numerous events, including climate an...

Recently, the Secretariat has stepped up capacity building activities related to the control of trade in waste, and more particularly the importation of plastic waste in countries of the Asia Pacific region. We provide assistance through two programmes: the Container Control Programme (CCP), which w...

Circular economy Another idea gathering mainstream attention is the adoption of a circular economy. The idea of a circular economy is to use resources more efficiently and to decouple economic growth from material inputs. This means accepting a systemic change that will transform how a business, o...

Harmonized System Be it promoting environmental goods and services or facilitating the adoption of circular business models, good trade-related policy requires good trade data, and this involves looking at the data generated by the Customs classification of goods. For trade beyond the imports/expo...

The National Board of Trade Sweden recently published a report entitled Trade and Climate Change – Promoting climate goals with a WTO agreement, which shows that trade policy-makers can do more to contribute to the promotion of climate goals. Customs administrations, through the World Customs...

Ongoing discussions related to the trade liberalization of environmental and climate-friendly goods Trade and the environment has been a long-standing topic in the WTO, and various – so far unsuccessful – attempts have been made to liberalize trade in environmental goods. The most recent of th...

Environmentally preferable products As mentioned above, another issue in previous negotiations has been whether to include so-called “environmentally preferable products” (EPPs). EPPs are defined in relation to alternative products, raising the question of where to draw the line on the scale fro...

Why are we looking at circular economy approaches? Global trade has experienced intense challenges for the past two years, with supply chains facing unprecedented pressures during the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently with the Russia-Ukraine war on the European continent. At the same time, the p...

Challenges In general, all circular models contain the following aspects: reducing, reusing, refurbishing, remanufacturing and recycling. For instance, IKEA is on an ambitious journey, with circular commitments defined until 2030. The company is focused on eliminating waste as much as possible, u...

How to enable and accelerate circular business models It is important to redefine waste as a resource to enable a circular economy. The legal definition of “waste”, that is still based on the Basel Convention, does not allow a distinction to be made between products/materials able to be reused, ...

Good trade-related policy requires good trade data. While it may occasionally be necessary to implement policies and trade measures without a data-driven understanding of the underlying trade, there is always the risk that doing so could deliver unpredictable results or miss the desired objectives. ...

There is a lot of trade in this commodity – why doesn’t it have its own HS Code? Every good is classified, but not all goods are specified by name in their own HS code.  The question of the varying levels of specificity around goods in the HS can be puzzling to people when they realise just h...

Why is country x classifying this item differently from country y? One question that arose frequently during the early days of the pandemic was why differences in classification at HS level sometimes emerged when countries compared classifications. For example, why might some countries classify pape...

Here are the points worth considering. A clear rationale – the “Why” Why would this proposal represent a good use of an HS code? There are millions of products, but there is limited capacity in a usable Customs nomenclature with a six-digit limit. As a result, goods are not added lightly[1]....

This article looks at how Singapore Customs strives to bring efficiency in the management of trade operations to lower their impact on the environment as well as at the initiatives it has taken to support environmental policies. The most frequently cited definition of sustainability is in Our Com...

What about trade? Singapore being one of Asia’s largest trading hubs, readers may ask “What about international trade and transport-related emissions?” The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore has launched the Singapore Green Initiative, which seeks to reduce the environmental impact of sh...

Lessening the impact of our activities The creation, processing, storage and movement of data rely extensively on finite resources: electricity, water, metals, chemicals and manmade materials, such as plastics and glass. This is why it is important to undertake rigorous environmental impact assess...