“Our ambition is to have as little environmental impact as possible. But sustainability does not only mean the environment, but we also measure it from a social point of view and from the point of view of governance. It is a very complex discussion and does not only involve the aspect of waste.

It is very difficult to measure the impact of a company from this perspective of sustainability. Each of us does pretty much what we want. We have no standards or units of measure by which we can compare companies from different sectors. For example, it is difficult to compare a recycler with a tourism company. I think that it will take some time before we can talk about the marks that companies will have in this regard and we will see what these measurements will be of use to us, if it is good or not,” Constantin Damov, president of GreenGroup said during Sustainability in Business Forum organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest and Sustainability Today.

“We make efforts to improve the relationship between the activity and environmental impact. Do you want to reduce your water footprint? You have to make some investments in sustainability for which the banks do not grant loans.

We need to see how we make sustainability an engine of development. The EU came up with that Green Deal, it imposed collection targets and recycling targets. And after that what do we do?

Plastics in Europe are at a critical moment because the industry does not want them back. You have passed a quota of 70%, and the world no longer wants so many recycled materials. We have to create markets for the Green Deal to have a market. Without a market, business has no meaning.

We are in a moment where the more we increase recycling, the more we are heading towards a point where we can block this development. We must concern ourselves more and more with the creation of markets, with the opening of markets.

Through our actions, we managed to reduce the water footprint and the CO2 footprint. Finished products made from recycled material reduce the CO2 footprint by at least 50%. But unfortunately, reducing the CO2 footprint does not generate an income, and these efforts are limited to the limit of competitiveness.

There is no circular economy and no linear economy. We have a single economy that can have a more or less circular behaviour. When the circular behaviour will be dominant, we will be able to say that we have a predominantly circular economy.

We need to bring new business models to the economy. For a new model to work, it must be bankable.

We annually throw more than 3 million tons of construction waste in an uncontrolled manner, and the cleaning of those areas will be done with public money, so we will bear an indirect social cost and we will pay it permanently from the central or local budget.”