On 4 February 2021, the European Commission's
Directorate-General for Competition held a discussion about how EU
competition policy can contribute to the Commission's
sustainability goals, embodied in the European Green Deal. In that
context, it discussed, amongst others, how to assess the
compatibility of sustainability agreements with article 101 of the
Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).
It should be noted at the outset that a significant number of
cooperation initiatives are likely to fall outside article 101 TFEU
because they do not restrict competition in the first place (for
example, sector-wide non-binding standards). Cooperation agreements
may, under certain circumstances, also benefit from either the
ancillary restraints and objective necessity doctrine as set out in
Wouters,1 or the Albany2 case
law, thereby escaping the application of article 101 TFEU.
