On Reasonable Demands for Avoidance and Recycling Regulations

Within the framework of existing legal regulations (BImSchG, technical guide: hazardous waste) recycling and avoidance measures necessitate certain criteria of proof for their enforcement. A central problem is the difficult and indefinite concept of law of the economically reasonable demands of recycling and avoidance orders. This is chiefly discussed in terms of reasonable costs. Even establishing the superiority or inferiority, costwise, of a production process is difficult in practice when one adjusts to the relevant cases of multi-factor and multi-product plants. Besides variations in capacity utilization rate, different price constellations as well as factor and product mixtures have to be included in the deliberations. Defining reasonable demands analogously to the formal criterion of pareto efficiency has proved to create reliable test procedures. A production process is designated economically reasonable when, with state-of-the-art technology, there is no other process which is uniformly more cost-advantageous within an a priori given domain of price and quantity combinations. The class of reasonably expected technology can be precisely described with this criterion in a formal way. In addition, practicable and intuitively sensible test criteria can be given for the optimal choice of a reasonable technology. As the formal criterion of reasonable demand can be applied to basically unlimited target functions, further standards of reasonable demand can be arrived at depending on the form of the target types.