The circular economy: European situation and responses

Abstract

The actual economic system, which should "manage fairly and sustainably limited resources" 1 , can't support this population increase because it's a 'take-make-dispose' economy which uses limited available resources without considering future generations, neither the planet.The main problem is that it's generally cheaper to buy the product that has a worse impact on its environment than the equivalent product that does less harm (see Chouinard Yvon et al, 2011, [4]). The reason is that costs to planet are negative externalities of difficult computation and since firms are not held accountable for their activities, these costs will not be translated into higher prices for customers. This situation changed only in the last decades when terms like sustainability, true cost accounting, and socially responsible investing (SRI), etc… started to be used.Today, people are more conscious of sustainability relevance, industries are studying greener solutions and Governments are creating laws and setting goals to improve green-footprints. Furthermore, in the last few years a new concept, that may help, was born: the "circular economy", where products can obtain a second life at the end of their first product-lifecycle. This paper reports on the advances and efforts in action across the EU with respect to the sustainability of our production and consumption systems. By considering recent evidence, it also draws on some critical aspects, which will require urgent intervention in the near future.In 2014, Florin Bonciu 2 described the large-scale implementation of the circular economy in the European Union and which benefits can be obtained by facing the ineluctable changes.Reinier de Man and Henning Friege 3 , in 2016 described the last policy created by the European Commission entitled "Circular Economy Closing the Loop" and proposed a sustainable resource management, backed up by multiple strategies, to face the practical problems that can be found in the policy implementation,