Sometimes capitalism and private entrepreneurship are not the most suitable responses to the community

Differentiated collection, as part of the circular economy guidelines, is a process that in many countries has taken on a strictly entrepreneurial key, with a mixture of public and private, in order to make the most of it. Today, this system reveals obvious cracks.

Since the requirement for recycling was established, households and businesses have learned the value (and burden) of environmental accountability through the coarse separation of household waste.

A fundamental step that allowed the start of the mechanical industrial separation of waste and the creation of a new raw material that could be re-employed in industry to create new items without the use of virgin raw materials.

Until then, waste, which was not separated, was delivered to landfill or incineration,losing valuable raw material, exponentially increasing pollution and not taking any advantage from the burning of waste.

Over the years, the entire recycling chain that covered the collection, separation, sale of separate waste, processing and the use of it in the production of consumer goods has been refined.

Mechanical recycling it has made great strides in separation, washing, shredding and granulation technologies, increasing overall volumes, improving the quality of processed waste, reducing the waste of not recyclable waste, finding new ways of using not recyclable fraction such as the creation of electricity through incinerators and creating new, better-performing raw materials.

The paradigm of industrial business normally sees in the state authorities responsible, the responsibility for the collection of waste and its separation for families of products, through contracts with private companies and the management of the sale, mainly through auctions, of the separate and packaged material.

The auction is intended to make the most of the waste for sale, the proceeds of which are used to cascade fund municipal organizations that contract privately to collect household waste.

Once the auction is over, the transformers who participated will transfer the selected waste to their plants to turn it into raw material. The sale of selected waste from a public facility to a private company allows the start of the processing and sale business on the recycled raw material market.

This apparent partnership between public and private is, broadly speaking, the backbone of the recycling system of products from recycling,especially in the plastics sector, ensuring the performance of a social task that concerns public hygiene and environmental sustainability and an entrepreneurial task that is to derive economic value from the activity related to waste.

Over the years this marriage has shown many times its weaknesses and contradictions,when, for example, the public sector operated so that waste auctions could rise freely at such high prices that buyers could not have a proper remuneration on the business.

Or access to the free international market for the purchase of waste, weakening the national processing industry many times, putting in competition private operators from different nations who worked with different production costs.

Logical, these, typically as a private enterprise of a socially-based person who was ill-conceived with the purpose and general principle of the circular economy.

Today, this marriage has come into crisis as it has discovered some inefficiencies in the system that have always been talked about, in particular the incentive or obligation of the use of recycled raw material to fulfill the circularity of the process.

With the cost of crude oil at such low levels and increasing consumer demand for greener products, the cost of virgin raw materials has reached very sharp declines in an attempt to recover the market at the expense of recycled ones.

If the situation persists, the recycling system can slow down or stop,as is already happening in the paper industry, as the final link in the recycling chain, manufacturers of recycled raw materials, will have no economic margins to compete with the prices of raw materials.

So, by going backwards you can easily guess how recyclers will decrease purchases at waste auctions and home collection authorities will not be able to continue to guarantee it because they will go into over stock.

If we look at the circularity of waste as a business activity we can say that this problem is part of the market logic, but if we consider it a social and moral commitment to the taxpayer population, so structured the business cannot work.

Waste management should be a public service,such as education, health or safety so that the supply chain can produce profits or cover service costs, but it can also ensure the effectiveness of the circular economy in the presence of major market fluctuations through public investment.

The downstream supply chain of collection should have the right remuneration of the work done, accessing the purchase of selected waste in a logic of continuity of prices, excluding upward auctions that create weaknesses of the processing system and endanger the supply chain.

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