This chapter provides an overview of circular economy (CE) and related concepts such as eco-design, biomimicry and eco-industrial development, exploring theoretical and empirical overlaps and complementarities. The circular economy concept is regarded in this chapter as the inspiration to guide public, civil societal and private sectors towards zero waste practices. Firstly, these concepts are independently reviewed from existing literature, categorising some of their nexus. Secondly, this chapter explores the distinction and tensions between the zero waste concept and the zero waste to landfill concept.Acknowledging how the nature of the stakeholders influences their resource management, the remaining chapters of this book were grouped per type of the main stakeholder (public and private sector and civil society) that promotes CE practices.

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This chapter provides a reflective analysis of the contributions focusing on how the chapters contribute to circular economy in two main themes that will define the future of circular economy research: challenges and opportunities and effective collaboration with stakeholders. Lessons learned and commonalities are also discussed to finally draw some conclusions and recommendations to further elaborate the research agenda of this field. Keywords Circular economy • Collaboration with stakeholders • Zero waste Country-Specific Challenges and OpportunitiesOne of the lessons from the chapters is that challenges and opportunities have been so far somewhat generically described in the literature, which tends to assume a universal view of challenges and opportunities, where the lessons from developed countries can be without a problem translated to developing countries. We argue that a more contingent approach is needed, taking into account deep structural, institutional and cultural differences between countries. In other words, our understanding of circular economy (CE) challenges and opportunities needs to be geographically and socially embedded to understand country-specific differences. Accordingly, in Chap. 2, Dieleman and Martínez analysed opportunities and challenges of CE in Mexico from a wide systemic perspective inspired by the concept of national innovation systems and its emphasis on distinctiveness of contextual conditions. To frame their discussion, they used the components of such concept, i.e. (i) "market trends and conditions"; (ii) "competitiveness and productivity"; (iii)

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Purpose-This paper presents an analysis of the influence of "Joint Environmental Policy-making" (JEP) in the operation of the company Smurfit Kappa (SK) in The Netherlands, Austria and Denmark (NL&AD). The paper aims to answer the question: to what extend has different levels of jointness and voluntariness of cardboard packaging-chain agreements between federal, governmental and business actors led to different recycling performances within the same company? Design/methodology/approach-JEP's analysis was framed under the model described by Mol, Volkmar and Liefferink by using information from mixed-methods throughout a semi-structured questionnaire for interviews and revision of relevant secondary data. This is a case of cross-national comparison for which origin and implementation level of JEPs were described per country, in accordance with those stages of the cardboard production chain. Findings-Jointness and voluntariness amongst other actors from governmental areas and business ranked high for the Dutch packaging-chain agreements with a visible impact in SK's recycling rates. SK in Austria and in Denmark, in this order, had a lower implementation level of JEPs which could be reflected in a lower recycling performance than in the Dutch SK subsidiaries. The context matters, including both political and social conditions. In particular, the role of householders as a last link in the recycling chain. Based on this, the selected countries share some societal characteristics associated with the environmental public awareness and active social participation. Originality/value-This paper fulfills an analysis of how environmental policy making is affected by the country context within the same company.