What Is China's "Circular Economy" Law?

Was wondering where Charlie McElwee has been recently -- turns out, he and the Squire, Sanders & Dempsey team have been busy figuring out the implications (as well as an accurate translation) of the new Chinese "Circular Economy" law.

From China Environmental Law:

Developing a circular economy. . .requires making overall plans, making reasonable layouts, adjusting measures to local conditions and focusing on actual effect. The development of a circular economy shall be propelled by the government, led by the market, effected by enterprises and participated in by the public.

Article 15: Enterprises producing products or packages listed in the catalogue of articles subject to compulsory recycle must be responsible for recycling discarded products or packages.

Article 16: The state adopts a key supervision and administration system to key enterprises in the high energy or water consuming industries such as steel, non-ferrous metal, coal, electric power, petroleum processing, chemical industry, building materials, building construction, paper-making, printing and dyeing.

Article 21: . . .Enterprises in such industries as electric power, oil processing, chemical industry, steel, non-ferrous metal and building materials must replace fuel oil with clean energy. . ."


Theres much, much more there, and I recommend checking back to get Charlie's take.

From what I can tell, the law involves a similar mode of thinking to the idea of "verbund", a German word meaning "linked" or "integrated" to the maximum degree -- except on a Chinese scale and with China-level control.

However, it's interesting that much of the enforcement seems to be vested in the local governments (where many of these national-level laws go to die, or so I've heard).