Measuring Progress towards a Circular Economy: A Monitoring Framework for Economy‐wide Material Loop Closing in the EU28

Summary The concept of a circular economy (CE) is gaining increasing attention from policy makers, industry, and academia. There is a rapidly evolving debate on definitions, limitations, the contribution to a wider sustainability agenda, and a need for indicators to assess the effectiveness of circu...

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Veröffentlicht in:Journal of industrial ecology Jg. 23; H. 1; S. 62 - 76
Hauptverfasser: Mayer, Andreas, Haas, Willi, Wiedenhofer, Dominik, Krausmann, Fridolin, Nuss, Philip, Blengini, Gian Andrea
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: United States Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.02.2019
John Wiley and Sons Inc
Schlagworte:
Balances (scales)
Circular economy
Circularity
Cycles
Cycling
Economics
Environmental impact
environmental pressures
Extraction
Gold
Hazardous wastes
Indicators
industrial ecology
Measures
Monitoring
Openness
Policy making
Recycling
Research and Analysis
secondary materials
Sensitivity analysis
Socioeconomics
SPECIAL FEATURE ON DIGGING DEEPER INTO THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY
Statistics
Waste management
environmental pressures
recycling
secondary materials
industrial ecology
waste management
circular economy
ISSN:1088-1980, 1530-9290
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Zusammenfassung:Summary The concept of a circular economy (CE) is gaining increasing attention from policy makers, industry, and academia. There is a rapidly evolving debate on definitions, limitations, the contribution to a wider sustainability agenda, and a need for indicators to assess the effectiveness of circular economy measures at larger scales. Herein, we present a framework for a comprehensive and economy‐wide biophysical assessment of a CE, utilizing and systematically linking official statistics on resource extraction and use and waste flows in a mass‐balanced approach. This framework builds on the widely applied framework of economy‐wide material flow accounting and expands it by integrating waste flows, recycling, and downcycled materials. We propose a comprehensive set of indicators that measure the scale and circularity of total material and waste flows and their socioeconomic and ecological loop closing. We applied this framework in the context of monitoring efforts for a CE in the European Union (EU28) for the year 2014. We found that 7.4 gigatons (Gt) of materials were processed in the EU and only 0.71 Gt of them were secondary materials. The derived input socioeconomic cycling rate of materials was therefore 9.6%. Further, of the 4.8 Gt of interim output flows, 14.8% were recycled or downcycled. Based on these findings and our first efforts in assessing sensitivity of the framework, a number of improvements are deemed necessary: improved reporting of wastes, explicit modeling of societal in‐use stocks, introduction of criteria for ecological cycling, and disaggregated mass‐based indicators to evaluate environmental impacts of different materials and circularity initiatives.
Bibliographie:Conflict of interest statement
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Several small corrections were made to table 1 after initial online publication.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
ISSN:1088-1980
1530-9290
DOI:10.1111/jiec.12809