Abstract
The “circular economy” package put forward by the European Commission in 2015 is an ambitious plan in the area of environmental protection. The aim of this legal framework is to replace what is nowadays referred to as the “linear economy”, in which people consume and throw away, with an economic system which supposedly reuses all its available resources. In spite of its probably good intentions, the circular economy package contains at least one directive which under current economic conditions is practically inapplicable in countries such as Romania. The packaging waste directive, which we speak of, focuses on raising mandatory recycling rates above the current levels. Past experience has shown that the present recycling system in Romania was unable to fulfil even the exiting, more modest targets. The lack of a necessary infrastructure in waste management and collection, combined with poor legislative measures made fulfilling individual environmental obligations a real challenge for producers of packaged goods. All the more, the recycling targets increase, without being correlated with the other conditions required for their completion, would place an undue burden on producers, that would also trigger a significant rise in consumer prices, especially in the area of foodstuff products.
Highlights
Paradoxical and disturbing is the fact that, in all this revelation and revolution of the way of thinking from the logic of “linearity” to the logic of “circularity”, the only scarce resource that can never obey this paradigm is the human resource – obviously, seen as individuality, and not as class/species
Having rather the status of theory, it contains a significant number of vaguely defined terms, as we argue in this paper, many times combined with fanciful proposals that do not take into account the limitations imposed by economic reality
We argue in the previous sections of our paper that the targets of the circular economy are not correlated with the economic realities
Summary
Paradoxical and disturbing is the fact that, in all this revelation and revolution of the way of thinking from the logic of “linearity” to the logic of “circularity”, the only scarce resource that can never obey this paradigm is the human resource – obviously, seen as individuality, and not as class/species. The conscience and comprehension of one’s limited life is only specific to humans, and only they take interest in the problem of “increasing the life” of limited resources that they consider critical They do this in a logic that exceeds the horizon of their own existence, out of a feeling (or a mix of feelings) of instinctual loyalty towards their direct descendants, of empathic loyalty towards their kin (species) or of transcendental loyalty towards the divinity that offered them the gift of creation and this needs to be passed on with orderliness. Businessmen and policymakers alike are considering new ways in which the same resources can enter multiple exploitation loops The former are motivated by profit and loss (which implies economic calculations under the rigorous constrains of existing levels of technology and capital), while the latter can be motivated by practically anything, from honest concerns for the economic good to full-blown rent-seeking through carefully devised legislative mechanisms. The last section will illustrate the real problems in Romania generated by the mismatch between mandatory targets and the economy’s development, with the case study on packaging waste management
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