Opinion Article for ÓpticaPro Magazine, January 2024
The growing awareness of the impacts of human activities on the planet and the onset of the climate crisis has underscored the need to promote more sustainable practices in all sectors, driving the concept of sustainability increasingly towards a civilizational, ethical, and legal imperative.
In this context, competition law is an ally at the intersection between the pursuit of economic excellence and the pursuit of meeting criteria, standards, and principles related to sustainability, precisely because competitiveness in the market is intrinsically linked to the notion of sustainable development.
By promoting competition, competition law creates a conducive environment for companies to innovate towards more efficient and sustainable business models. The protection of economic efficiency and, especially, innovation, encourages the search for solutions that minimize, for example, environmental impact, as consumers are gradually becoming more attentive to ethical issues, demanding products and services that respect high standards of social and environmental responsibility.
As such, companies have been striving to integrate sustainable practices into their activities, both through top-down assessment of their value chain and through their participation in sectoral organizations promoting sustainability. This is evident in our optics sector, where the respective players have once again been at the forefront of modernity, seeking to minimize the negative externalities generated in the scope of their activities individually and through associative means (e.g., recycling of waste produced in lens manufacturing; reduction of fossil/non-renewable resources used and raising awareness among consumers of potentially polluting resources, such as contact lenses).
In addition to inherent synergies, the challenge of the climate crisis has successively prompted the explicit integration of sustainability considerations into competition law and policy, with the aim of providing some clarity and legal certainty regarding possible areas of tension between these two realities.
The European Commission, in its new Horizontal Guidelines published in June 2023, devotes a new chapter to sustainability agreements to provide some clarity and legal certainty regarding their scope within the scope of application of competition law prohibitions, highlighting the increasing importance of this issue.
Similar approaches have been followed at the national level, both through the communication of guidance by competition authorities (as in the case of the Netherlands and France) and through legislative means (as in Austria, where - in addition to the existence of guidelines - the national competition legal regime has been amended to expressly provide for this type of concerns).
In the words of the former President of the Portuguese Competition Authority, competition "is a driver for innovation and sustainability is no exception," with the intersection and integration between the two being a strong weapon to address contemporary challenges. The promotion of competition policy and the clarification or even encouragement of business practices respectful of ethical and sustainable standards – particularly horizontal cooperation agreements on environmental matters – are fundamental steps to pursue virtuous development.
Gonçalo Anastácio / Marcelo Sequeira de Sousa
