AUTHORS:

Carlos Jairo Ramírez Rodríguez, 14, Coordinator of the of Productive Sectors Sustainability Group, Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development

ABSTRACT:

Grupo Retorna, a Non-Profit Entity, is the first alliance for the environmentally safe management of post-consumer waste in Colombia and Latin America. Represents companies from different economic sectors, helping to comply with the principle of Extended Producer Responsibility, integrating and optimizing operational processes, for the benefit of the country.

In 2018, Colombia formed the National Board for the Sustainable Management of Plastic, with government entities, private sector, academia, recyclers, NGOs and research institutions; within this context, the National Plan for the Sustainable Management of Single-Use Plastics, which included “lines of action per product” directed towards improving the environmental characteristics of plastic products, the rational use of plastics, the culture in commercial establishments.

The courts in the following three examples from Colombia, Argentina, and Pakistan each considered cases involving an entire watershed and created unique solutions to supervise the long-term cleanup and restoration of the river systems. The Colombia Consejo de Estado, the country’s highest administrative appeals court, issued a judgment in 2014 against companies, government agencies, and municipalities that caused or failed to prevent the degradation of the Bogotá River watershed.

The theme of the Eko Red project, a green company, is “The circular economy: reuse, reuse and recycle” given that we are a company focused on the design and operation of a sustainable model that allows us to recycle post-industrial products into the supply chain through a circular economy model that includes recyclers, warehouses and factories; enabling the reduction of environmental impacts and generating a social transformation.

The Sustainable Enterprises Network (RedES) drives changes towards sustainable production systems in companies and value chains in order to improve efficiency and competitiveness. Since 2013, RedES has been applied in Cundinamarca, Colombia through the RedES-CAR program. In this program, 550 companies have adopted the circular economy strategies of Cleaner Production and Industrial Symbiosis. These companies formulated 507 initiatives with total savings of $55,534 million COP.