The Circular Economy – A new sustainability paradigm?

Abstract

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Conceptualizing the Circular Economy: An Analysis of 114 Definitions

“…We also skimmed the bibliographies of identified conceptual articles. Definitions included based upon this approach were inter alia definitions provided in Geissdoerfer et al (2017), Murray et al (2017), Zhu et al (2010aZhu et al ( , 2010b and definitions outlined by the Circular Academy (2017). Thirdly, we also included all definitions outlined in a recent special issue on the circular economy in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (Bocken et al, 2017) as well as additional recent literature, e. g. Skene (2017), as suggested by one reviewer of this paper.…”

“…For instance, Geng et al (2009, p.16) write that CE would aim to "bring great […] social benefits". Scholars researching the sharing economy, a neighbouring field to CE (Geissdoerfer et al, 2017), have begun a fruitful conversation regarding its social equity impacts with several scholars, e.g. Frenken and Schor (2017) or Schor (2017), highlighting that it may increase inequalities.…”

“…This is indicated by the rapid growth of peer-reviewed articles on CE: More than 100 articles were published on the topic in 2016, compared to only about 30 articles in 2014 (Geissdoerfer et al, 2017). On the other hand, many consultancy reports have been published on the topic recently (with consultancies attempting to signal expertise on trending topics to clients via such reports (Kipping and Clark, 2012)).…”

“…These can blur the concept since they frequently operate in significantly different worlds of thought (Gladek, 2017;de Vries and Petersen, 2009). Blurriness has been raised as a criticism against concepts such as the green economy one (Loiseau et al, 2016) and it has also been raised against CE in various CE review articles we identified (Ghisellini et al, 2016;Lieder and Rashid 2016;Blomsma and Brennan, 2017;Sauvé et al, 2016;Murray et al, 2017;Geissdoerfer et al, 2017;Lewandowski, 2016; further details in Table 1) and beyond. For instance, Lieder and Rashid (2016, p.37) point out that "there are various possibilities for defining [CE]", while Yuan et al (2008, p.5) write that "there is no commonly accepted definition of [CE]".…”

Energy recovery from Municipal Solid Waste in EU: proposals to assess the management performance under a circular economy perspective

“…In the last decades, the linear 'take-make-use-dispose' economy approach has been used, relying on the production of large quantities of low-cost, easily accessible material and energy, a model that has reached-up to the end of the line, due to its many environmental challenges: the resource depletion, waste generation and emissions [5][6]. The sustainability role is to address economic, social and environmental issues of present and future generations, in the perspective of a balanced and systemic integration of intra and intergenerational economic, social, and environmental performance [7]. To overcome the environmental challenges of the conventional linear economy model and moving towards sustainability, the concept of Circular Economy (CE) has become one of the most modern approaches to address economic growth and environmental sustainability, aiming to the implementation of closed loop material flow in the whole economic system [8].…”