Catalin Stancu, Horvath & Partners: “Romania should accelerate the process of absorbing EU funds for the circular economy”

Catalin Stancu, Associated Senior Expert, Horvath & Partners, said during “The Circular Economy Roadmap 2021”, organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest:

“Green Deal brings a new economic paradigm, but also the concept of circular economy. The circular economy is an integrative area, extremely complex. There are already programmatic documents, frameworks for monitoring what the circular economy means.

It is a more complicated concept. There are three areas that characterize the concept of circular economy; resource efficiency, waste management and innovation. Without innovation and new technologies it will be very difficult to achieve things that bring progress.

Regarding the efficient use of resources, Romania is on the penultimate place in the EU, Bulgaria being the last.

Romania has a major handicap in terms of the circular economy. But we have an extraordinary chance through those 80 billion euros from the EU that we should be able to absorb 100%.

We should increase the productivity of the absorption process by almost 3-5 times, which would be an absolutely spectacular performance and is an extremely ambitious goal. To achieve this goal, the business environment must be informed which projects to prepare and which areas to target.”