European Economic and Social Committee

I'm on another field trip today, up the road where Europe's civil society has their voice in Brussels.

I'm at the European Economic and Social Committee, and I'll be joined by Seamus Boland, President of the European Economic and Social Committee, which is affectionately acronymed as the EESC.

If you've never heard of the EESC before, don't worry, you're not alone.

And that's exactly why we're doing this episode.

It's one of those institutions that quietly shapes an enormous amount of EU policy, but rarely gets talked about outside Brussels.

We're also going to get into some real finance policy today.

The Savings and Investments Union, retail investors, supervisory convergence, and financial literacy.

These are all areas where the EESC's work and the Commission's work on financial services genuinely overlap.

So I think that's something where there's more work to do.

There's definitely some more at the European level recognition that the European Economic and Social Committee has started to go through this process of recognizing natural polymers as a distinct and not plastic category.

It's not fully gone through yet, but the first vote went through a couple of months ago.

So we're starting to see some recognition at the European policy level for natural polymers.