During the Circular Economy workshop in Barcelona, project partners and stakeholders have had the opportunity to interact and to discuss about the Best practices for the promotion of EMAS and implement circular economy strategies & policies.
Each partner had the opportunity to get more details about the good practices and start working on the definition of their best choice.
As an example of the meeting results, partners have identified the opportunity to design an incentive for the waste sector that could potentially be extended to mining activities. This incentive has been inspired by an Italian good practice - reduction of financial guarantees - that has been largely implemented in different laws and regulation and at different levels in Italy. During the exchange session, partners and stakeholders learnt that imposing financial guarantees to waste management sites and services is a common measured adopted by competent authorities. The financial guarantee could combine different criteria, for example in Catalonia it mainly considers the size/capacity of the facilities and the fact that they storage/manage hazardous or non-hazardous waste. A social criterion is also taken into account and it allows to benefit non-for-profit organizations working in the waste management sector.
These criteria could be enriched by considering also EMAS and circular economy, the second aspect could reflect how the organization is contributing to the circular economy, for example because it works on the smaller cycles of circular economy.
The round table with circular economy experts provided different views on the topic and the discussion has been very helpful. One of the main lessons learned is that both private and public organizations still have to learn how to work in symbiosis with others and to share resources. This approach will certainly increase their efficiency in the use of resources and also competitiveness as we learnt form the site visits to the Barcelona’s Opera House and the Port Authority of Barcelona. EMAS organizations can be good candidates to integrate this systemic vision and collaborative thinking as they already have a working framework that helps them to take into account their context and their interested parties. Their experiences could help on the dissemination of this approach within other organizations.
