The Management of Municipal Waste through Circular Economy in the Context of Smart Cities Development

Abstract

The paper focus on the topic of circular economy in the context of sustainable development, as one major objective of today’s societies. Circular economy is mostly characterized by the need to improve the use of resources,by reducing waste and recycling. Under the sustainable development broader circumstances, circular economy becomes one of the important part of providing resources for the future generations, based on intra and intergenerational solidarity, having as starting points the 3 R (reuse, recirculation, recycling) and extending the lifecycle of products. Also, a circular economy is an important factor to develop the smart cities. The smart city can be understood as a sustainable city, a city well performing in economy, governance, but also in environment and living. The paper aims to identify a set of major actions recommended at the European Union level in order to promote this vision. It aims as well to highlight some of the economic and institutional barriers that might be faced at all economic levels. The EU recommendations associated with the trends of increasing the prices of raw materials and also with the need to reduce the import dependency such as better ensure the energetic security and sustainability by respecting the imperatives of environment protection, require a focus on efforts towards these directions. Starting from these approaches, we analyzed the progress achieved by Romania in the last ten years and the extent to which the country is prepared to implement an efficient management of municipal waste in order to promote the circular economy vision. Based on the progresses obtained in the last decade, we appreciate that Romanian decision makers had understood the importance of circular economy and had taken some specific action dedicated to the focus on this direction. Although some of the indicators referring to recycling show an improvement in Romania, it still has to improve performance in this field. We consider that one of the main challenges for the future in terms of circular economy refers to the further development of the sectors associated with the circularity of resource and with the emergence of employment opportunities, based both on an active involvement of public and private sectors.