The most popular definition of sustainable development, which can be found in the Brundtland Report, sets an ideal goal but do not provide a clear direction for the implementation of sustainable solutions. Other related concepts and approaches have emerged as means to progress towards sustainability in a more pragmatic way, such as the circular economy. The circular economy has risen to prominence at a rate and on a scale to rival the idea of sustainable development itself. This is despite the fact that there is relatively little about the circular economy that is entirely original-it draws heavily on precursor concepts such as industrial ecology and industrial symbiosis. These ideas have received renewed impetus even whilst being eclipsed in both academic and policies debates. In order to address this paradox and help establish the identity and contribution of these fields, this article presents the concepts of circular economy, industrial symbiosis and sustainable development, summarizing their complex and often intertwined evolutionary paths, focusing on relevant developments and implementation challenges. In addition, the authors point out the divergences and interrelations of these concepts and link them to other adjacent concepts and research fields, such as ecological modernisation and the green economy. Additionally, the potential contribution of industrial symbiosis and the circular economy to sustainable development and to the Sustainable Development Goals set in the United Nations Agenda 2030 is briefly discussed.
Sharing economy business experiences are rapidly rising worldwide and deeply changing structures and models of customers purchasing attitudes and needs. Inspired by principles of sustainable consumption, its starting point is the idea that every underutilized resource is a wasted resource. Beyond the digital services implemented by sharing platform, there are also social and physical places where communities are experimenting the potential of collaborative and innovative solutions: purchasing groups, time banking, social street, co-working spaces. Goods and services access promoted by sharing business models are emerging in the place of older model based on private propriety and a consumerist view of society. This is strongly connected with circular economy strategies, particularly referred to waste prevention, reduction and resources valorisation European goals. This paper gives an overview of sharing economy including drivers and barriers which can affect its effective expansion. Moreover, collaborative models in the most strategic and critical sectors (such as mobility, agro-food, buildings and goods production and consumption) by a resources perspective, will be analysed to show how sharing economy can contribute to circular economy. At this end, this paper explores the circularity approach and in particular it identifies the role of sharing economy in products and services from a life cycle thinking (LCT) approach. The focus will be the benefits of the sharing economy models considering mainly two aspects; a) the length of the product's use phase (lifetime) and b) the intensity of use. A review of available data considering the most strategic sectors in terms of environmental impacts, will also be presented from a sharing economy point of view.
Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is a business-focused collaborative approach oriented towards resource efficiency that has been theorised and studied mainly over the last twenty-five years. Recently, IS seems to have found a renewed impetus in the framework of the Circular Economy (CE), a novel approach to sustainability and
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