P olici es fo r s uppo rting G r e e n I ndu st r y
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Legal frameworks for greening industries should facilitate the integration of environmental, economic and development policies, and provide a framework and means for their implementation and enforcement.
Box 4. Circular Economy Promotion Law of the People’s Republic of China In August 2008, China passed the Circular Economy Promotion Law, which promotes initiatives related to reducing, reusing and recycling in production and consumption. The Circular Economy (CE) approach to resource efficiency integrates cleaner production and industrial ecology into a broader system encompassing industrial firms, networks, or chains of firms, eco-industrial parks, and regional infrastructure to support resource efficiencies. The CE initiative targets its actions at three levels: 1. At the individual firm level, the manager must seek much higher efficiency through the 3Rs of Cleaner Production. 2. Reuse and recycle resources in industrial parks and clustered or chained industries, so that resources will circulate fully in the local production system. 3. Integrate different production and consumption systems in a region so that resources circulate among industries and urban systems. The law states that governments at all levels and across relevant departments should be responsible for organizing, coordinating and regulating the circular economy initiatives. Source: ekh.unep.org
3.4.4 Sector and issue-based strategies: Resource efficiency action plans Strategies aimed at improving resource efficiency are the focus of increasing worldwide interest. In Europe, for example, the European Union (EU) as well as some of its individual member States are working towards resource efficiency plans. Among the latest advances of the EU and part of its growth strategy ‘Europe 2020’ is the flagship initiative “Resource efficient Europe”. A “Roadmap for a resource-efficient Europe” will be published in the second quarter of 2011. It aims to help decouple economic growth from resource use, support the shift towards a low carbon economy, increase the use of renewable energy sources, modernise the transport sector and promote energy efficiency. Resources, in this context, are often interpreted in a broad sense, encompassing all natural resources, including biotic and abiotic materials, water, air, soil, energy, and partly even the systemic functions of ecosystems. Apart from achieving higher resource productivity, resource efficiency strategies are also devised to manage limited resource availability and decrease the environmental impacts resulting from resource use, i.e. to achieve an absolute decoupling of economic growth from resource use and its negative impacts. Developing and implementing holistic and coherent national frameworks for greater resource efficiency is best done collaboratively between different experts and stakeholders from various backgrounds (see Box 5 for an illustration of the recent process in Austria).