MACF: Latest updates and information for importers
A few days before the deadline for the submission of the third quarterly report for carbon emissions from products imported into the EU, new aid documents for importers were made available.
You are an importer of steel, aluminum, cement products and you must report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for your imported products. In most cases, it is your suppliers who must provide you with this information. However, they often find it difficult to understand what is expected of them, whether in terms of the data to be provided or the methods to be used to obtain them.
To enable you to accompany your suppliers in completing the table made available by the EU, you can now consult specific examples by sector of activity: the Commission has made available on its dedicated page 7 Excel files containing the exact structure of the items to be filled in, with specific examples of imported products:
- 1 file concerning cement (Customs Chapter 25)
- 3 files on iron and steel products, ranging from semi-finished products (bars and profiles) to the most developed products such as screws and bolts (Customs Chapters 72 and 73)
- 1 file concerning aluminium, with example of the manufacture of aluminium wire (Chapter 76)
- 2 files dedicated to chemical fertilizers and hydrogen (Chapters 28 and 31)
These files are the first simplified and concrete tools to better understand the information expected from suppliers, particularly as regards the explanation of production processes and the inclusion (or not) of precursors (incoming raw materials in the manufacture of products). They fully complement the guidance documents for suppliers, which are now available in 6 languages (Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, Korean, Ukrainian and Chinese).
We advise you to send these files to your suppliers to facilitate them with the many technical information requested.
As a reminder, the third quarterly GHG emission report, to be submitted before July 31, 2024, will be the last report authorizing the use of 100% default values for emissions. For future reports, only until 31 December 2024, other methods such as mass balance sheets or known carbon management schemes in supplier countries remain allowed. By the end of the year, however, it will be necessary to provide accurate data, since to date there is no communication suggesting any further delay at EU level.
A Note to Operators, published on June 28th also specifies the treatment of steel and aluminium packagings. These packagings must be taken into account in the MACF declaration only if they are released to customs (discharge for consumption) strictly speaking, i.e. when they arrive in empty EU territory or when they are intended for prolonged use (such as drums or containers).
Source(s): European Commission
Editor(s): L. SPRIET