“The Department of Sustainable Development provides the Secretariat of the Circular Economy Coordination Committee in Romania, which is, in fact, the main coordination forum.

Immediately after the adoption of the committee by Government Decision, we continued the activity of operationalizing this governance structure and finalizing, at the decision level, the coordination of the 10 commissions.

These coordinators were decided during the meetings of the Coordinating Committee. And so, we have Laszlo Borbely, Councilor of State for the Transversal Commission, who coordinates Commission 1.

For the Agriculture and Forestry Commission we have State Secretary Aurel Simion, from the Ministry of Agriculture. From the Ministry of Economy, State Secretary Lucian Ioan Rus coordinates the Automotive, Textile, Electrical Equipment, Electronics, Batteries and Accumulators Committees.

Daniel Surdu, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Public Works Development, Entrepreneurship and Tourism, is chairman of the Construction Commission, Commission 4.

And from the Ministry of the Environment, Secretary of State Cristian Valer Beșeni coordinates four commissions: Food and Beverages, Packaging, Waste, Water and Wastewater,” Ileana Luminita Balalau, Director, Department of Sustainable Development, Government of Romania said during Circular Economy Conference organized by Sustainability-Today and The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“Then followed the establishment of the Technical Secretariats for these commissions. They were established at the level of the Ministry of the Environment, at the Ministry of Agriculture. There are two more Ministries that are to establish these Secretariats and Working Groups.

We have already had two meetings, for now, with the Ministries that are responsible for transversal actions, and we are going to invite the private sector to participate in these working groups, to discuss how we can identify financing solutions to implement the measures of the Plan.

I think that these meetings are very important, first, to familiarize even the representatives from the Ministries with the measures they are responsible for, but also to communicate different opportunities.

When we started working with the Ministries, we realized that what we must do is not easy and we thought that assistance, financial support is needed. And then the Department together with the Ministry of Finance elaborated a joint address to the international financial institutions, to the EBRD, the EIB and the World Bank, through which we requested their support so that we could secure funding for the Action Plan.

All three banks responded positively and said they are joining forces to support us. We had a technical meeting with all three banks and now they are going to present us with the possibilities of support for the Action Plan. Coordinated support is needed. There is a need for coordination of actual support from the three institutions for the actions of the Plan.

We have a monitoring plan right in the content of the action plan, but together with the commissions we are working on expanding it because not only the 52 actions need to be monitored, the priority ones, but the supporting actions as well.

By the end of March, we should have it completed. Unfortunately, we did not receive any responses from the Ministries that were responsible for data collection. Like I said, it’s not an easy process. But we are trying to finish it. So, we still need to open the discussion with the private sector to complement these actions and measures, but not only.

At the same time, in parallel, we are working on creating a digital platform for this action plan, to track the actions of the plan. And it’s a process that takes time. It is a specification already drawn up for the acquisition of the development service of this digital platform, which will include the actions of the plan, respondents, to make the process transparent. We also want to collect circular economy data.

We are working with colleagues at the Ministry of Research to introduce the platform to the government cloud, so that we have data from the institutions that generate statistical data for the circular economy.

We hope that next year we will have a functional digital platform for tracking the implementation of the circular economy action plan.”