Recently European Commission (EC) announced that it is
scrapping plans to introduce a Circular Economy Package. Instead, it will
launch a 'broader and more ambitious' waste package next year. The draft
circular economy package was aiming to achieve a proposed 70 per cent recycling
and reuse target for 2030, as well as a requirement for Member States to
recycle 80% of packaging waste by 2030.
This announcement was faced as a step backwards from many stakeholders,
including, Environmental Services Association (ESA, UK), Municipal Waste Europe and Friends of Earth but also companies like IKEA and Unilever who officially
expressed their disagreement with the EC’s plans to postpone the draft package.
On the other hand, CEWEP hopes that “we would like to see an ambitious approach
to phasing out landfilling as soon and as much as possible so that the full
potential of waste as a resource would be unleashed, by increasing recycling
and energy generation from the remaining waste”, as CEWEP’s Managing Director
Ella Stengler said (see more here).
The whole discussion seems to be controversial and somehow
difficult for the waste management sector. This is why I fully support ISWA’s
recent decision to establish a new Task Force on Resource Management to
investigate the contribution that the Waste Management Sector can offer to the
Circular Economy and to identify the barriers and challenges that need to be
overcome to support the transition from waste management to resource management (for more see here).
However, my personal approach is that before getting into
the details of the relationship between circular economy and waste management
industry, we better examine carefully the concepts of circular and linear
economy. Because I believe that the biggest problems and challenges regarding
the circular economy are included in its own definition. And although there is
no doubt regarding the high benefits of closed loops of materials and the
extension of prevention and reuse practices, I have a lot of doubts regarding
the circularity of political correctness that is related with circular economy
and its impacts to sound waste management practices.
So I will put some conceptual questions and in next posts I
will try to outline possible answers.
1. Are there biophysical limits to circular economy or a
close to 100% circularity is possible? What can we learn from natural sciences
and physics regarding circularities?
2. What is really new in circular economy? How circular
economy is related with new materials, product design and consumption? Are we
focusing on the business models or the technologies involved? Why is it so
attractive for many big companies? How it is related with Big Data systems and
the Internet of Things?
3. What we call “circular economy” is the same in developed
and developing countries? Is linear economy outdated? Can we have a global
uniform approach or circular economy is a privilege of the already rich
countries?
4. W
hat a circular economy means for waste
management? How it is related with zero waste efforts and recycling? Are
landfills and waste treatment plants going to be eliminated? Finally, does
circular economy means the end of the waste management industry, as we know it?
Well, I will try to outline some answers for discussion,
starting from next week.
