Acting Environmentally Proactive in an Emerging Market-Oriented Economy

As a new member of the European Union (EU), Romania has to align its economy with that of other EU partners, including the addition of a proactive component to environmental protection. This requires the development of a transitive approach capable of overcoming the difficulties of implementing the sustainability paradigm within an emerging market-oriented economy, which despite its progress, is still not fully prepared to understand and accept sustainability. This paper describes such a transition, showing how INCD ECOIND (the main Romanian Research and Development entity in the field of industrial ecology) reshaped its policies to include in current projects developed with Romanian partners the following elements: the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) Directive, components relating to the REACH Process; the Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) mainframe and assistance in cultivating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as an intrinsic part of modern enterprise. Lessons learned from previous and current projects are presented, underlining the complexity of obstacles met and problem-solving procedures derived and verified in practice.