Abstract
The circular economy has become one of the main strategic issues on a global scale in the striving towards achieving sustainable economic systems. The traditional model of production, consumption and disposal is being transformed into a recycling and waste integration process from the beginning of the production cycle of a product until its full use by the consumers. While measuring the progress towards a circular economy can be a challenging factor, several indicators can be used to evaluate developments in this direction. That is why recycling in general, as well as recycling of municipal waste, have become a main strategic issue in the process towards implementation of circular economy principles. The main objective of the paper is to elaborate a panel regression model for determining the dependency between main indicators, that are indicating progress of the circular economy in Europe, such as the recycling rate of municipal waste, circular material use rate, R&D expenditure by all sectors, trade in recyclable raw materials and environmental tax revenues, resource productivity and domestic material consumption. Furthermore, the fixed and random effects regression models estimations are included and tested through the Durbin–Hausman–Wu statistic. The research in this study is based on the analysis of regressions in the circular economy fields in the European Union and intends to contribute to the research in the field, being an emerging scientific topic due to changing technological, economic and environmental factors.
Highlights
The circular economy represents a main concept for the sustainability of the EU economy representing the creation of certain models of economy where minimum or no environmental negative impacts are created, respecting the triple bottom line, namely people, planet and profit
The first part of the study focused on finding potential correlations between the recycling rate of municipal waste with the other selected indicators, which were presented in the research methodology
As Stofova [12] mentioned, the municipal waste was defined in the case of European Union countries as “a large extent of waste generated by households but may include similar wastes generated by small businesses and public institutions and collected by the municipality; this latter part of municipal waste may vary from municipality to municipality and from country to country, depending on the local waste management system”
Summary
The circular economy represents a main concept for the sustainability of the EU economy representing the creation of certain models of economy where minimum or no environmental negative impacts are created, respecting the triple bottom line, namely people, planet and profit. The recycling efficiency issues especially of municipal waste, as well as the circular material usage are two of the main subjects of debate for the political, economic and social fields These two aspects, as well as the design of non-waste generating products and services represent some of the main elements for an efficient implementation of the circular economy in the production and consumption process. While the striving towards sustainability and green energy has become one of the main issues of debate, waste management is still a problem when it comes to reducing the amount of waste produced on a global scale, as well as its reuse, repair or reintegration further in other production and consumption processes Valuable resources, such as metal, wood, glass, paper and other, can be reused after the main lifecycle of a product, bringing more value than the main life cycle of a product or material. As the need for a circular economy becomes a usual standard within the business field, studies concerning consumers’ behavior towards sustainable production and consumption have started to emerge, such as the one of Lakatos et al for the Romanian market [8], which revealed the interviewed sample of respondents between 35–44 years old, was mostly concerned about less impact on the environment through sustainable business and consumption model in comparison to the younger generations from 18–35 years old
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