Head of the September plenary and the forthcoming trilogue on the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) downstream extension, EFF has published a position paper setting out the foundry sector’s priorities for the European Parliament and Council.
EFF supports the CBAM’s underlying objective — preventing carbon leakage and protecting industry that decarbonises under a carbon price - but warns that, as currently designed, the mechanism penalises foundries on both sides: it raises the cost of imported raw materials for which EU production is minimal, while leaving most imported finished foundry products outside its scope.
Of the 58 product categories the sector asked to see covered, only 17 were retained in the ENVI Committee’s position of 6 July, leaving 41 uncovered. At the same time, essential imported inputs — low-phosphorus pig iron and the ferro-alloys ferro-chrome, ferro-manganese and ferro-nickel — remain subject to CBAM despite negligible EU production, adding an estimated €80 million per year in costs with no carbon-leakage benefit.
EFF is calling on co-legislators to:
- Extend the CBAM scope to the remaining 41 foundry product categories;
- Exclude, or otherwise neutralise the cost of, essential imported inputs with negligible EU production;
- Correct the Temporary Decarbonisation Fund’s eligibility criterion so that its broadened scope actually reaches foundries;
- Ensure coherence between CBAM and the ETS review, including on free allocation for mixed-production plants and export exposure.
The European foundry industry represents an annual turnover of around €31 billion, over 2,300 companies — most of them SMEs — and some 138,000 skilled workers, making it the third largest foundry sector globally. Behind these numbers is a manufacturing capability built up over generations — metallurgical know-how, engineering skills and production capacity that cannot be easily rebuilt once lost.
Read the full position paper at the following link.