As regards Article 90 of the Treaty, the Commission concluded that France had failed to meet its obligations under Article 90 of the Treaty by applying the so-called ‘rendering levy’ to purchases of meat and other products specified by any person retailing such products, and that the levy was offset, at least in part, in the case of French products, by full public financing of rendering and the collection of animal carcases and products seized at slaughterhouses, whereas the levy was paid on products from other Member States under the same conditions but they did not benefit from the advantages of the fund into which the levy is paid.

This was not the case with the rendering scheme laid down by Law No 75-1336 of 31 December 1975 supplementing and amending the Code rural as regards the rendering industry (20), which was based on adding value to the products collected by the rendering undertaking in exchange for a monopoly on collection in a given area.

In France, exemption from the cost of rendering those same products might have had an impact on the price of beef and veal but, according to the French authorities, this could not have been greater than the impact of the cost, downstream, of the rendering levy.

As the public rendering service is free of charge, those benefiting from it, i.e. slaughterhouses, stockfarmers and holders of animal meal, do not have to meet the cost of eliminating the waste produced by their activities.

As the rendering levy is imposed on businesses above a certain minimum total turnover rather than on the basis of sales of meat, a business that is exempt from the levy may in fact sell more meat than a business that pays the levy because of a higher total turnover generated by other products.

There were problems in some Member States in regard to the volume of material being produced since the addition of bovine intestine to the SRM list. Some Member States have to store material pending an increase in their rendering/incineration capacity, others have to export SRM to other Member States for rendering or incineration.