“Through our solutions we are present in more than 100 markets worldwide. And this has allowed us to accumulate valuable expertise because we are partners in the construction of different types of waste management systems. Recently our company commissioned a study with the help of Eunomia, a consulting company, which evaluated waste management systems and we issued a white paper called Holistic Resource Systems. It is an integrated approach that combines several solutions.

There are three types of solutions here. We are talking about the Deposit Return System that collects and processes beverage packaging, with over 90% collection performance. In EU there are already more than half of the countries that have adopted such a system. In addition to this we have a Separate Collection System, which captures different fractions, like electrical and electronic equipment waste, organic, paper, glass, textiles, and the collection and Sorting of Mixed Municipal Waste, which, in the end, captures those materials that were not diverted from the landfill with the help of the other two systems,” Doinita Mihai, VP Public Affairs Tomra, Eastern Europe South, TOMRA said during Circular Economy Conference organized by Sustainability Today and The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“Romania is now facing a new stage of financing and structuring of these systems. Technology is needed to bring the material put on the market by producers to the recycler’s gate, to achieve country targets and European targets. Infrastructure is needed. Our company partners with various actors in these industries and provides effective solutions, tested in other countries, which bring benefits and translate the concept of circular economy from abstract to concrete.

The big problem of the efficient waste management in Romania is the lack of infrastructure. We do not have a proper infrastructure to bring all these post consumption materials in a recycling flow. The role of technology is to be a binder.

Vision and dialog are needed but firstly we need a complete legislative framework to allow the acquisition of modern technology, the best available technology. If we talk about textiles, for example, our solutions can sort it for decades. Why it is not used already in Romania it’s because we also need a legislative framework to enable the textile collection for processing and recycling.

It is also needed a synchronization of the financing sessions. There is an impact from implementation of DRS. Extracting the beverage containers from the other flows, we understand that the manual sorting is not efficient anymore. We need technology to make this whole process more efficient, to reduce costs for producers and to make resource recovery more efficient.”