Issues of sustainable development began to concern mankind starting from the 20th century, when mass industrialization and the depletion of natural resource potential contributed to the formulation of environmental issues at one of the leading places in scientific discourse. However, what if the goals of sustainable development would not be achieved to 2030? What other way we can identify for humanity to survive? So, the study is about the problems of studying the understanding of the term “sustainable development”, considering the evolution of the formation of the concept of sustainable development and analyzing the modern goals of sustainable development for attainability. From an analysis of domestic and foreign experience, possible scenarios of the development of mankind are identified (such as 1. Creating an environmental framework, 2. Implementation of sustainable nature management practices in the conditions of natural and man-made objects, 3. Implementation of “geoengineering projects”, 4. Construction of autonomous ecosystems, 5. Space exploration in search of a new planet for life, provided that the goals of sustainable development would not be achieved. It has been established that today probability of achieving all the sustainable development goals by 2030 is too small, and the indicated scenarios require, firstly, the development of science and technology, and secondly, a competent assessment of the value of nature and solving the issue of specifying property rights for natural goods.

Nowadays, the sorption-oriented approach is on the agenda in the remediation practices of lands contaminated with heavy metals. The current growing quantity of research accounts for different sorbets. However, there is still a lack of studies utilizing the economic criteria. Therefore, to ensure a wide application of opportunities, one of the necessary requirements is their economic efficiency in use. By utilizing these criteria, this manuscript researches the generally accepted natural sorbents for the assessment of heavy metal ions’ adsorption, such as peat, diatomite, vermiculite and their mixtures in different proportions and physical shapes. The methodological base of the study consists of the volumetric (titrimetric) method, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and atomic absorption spectrometry. Experimental tests show a certain decline in the efficiency of heavy metal ions’ adsorption from aqueous salt solutes as follows: granular peat–diatomite > large-fraction vermiculite > medium-fraction vermiculite > non-granular peat–diatomite > diatomite.

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The relevance of an ecosystem approach, which involves addressing ecosystems as an object of research, economically evaluating ecosystem services, and including the existing variety of evaluation methods and their classifications for the estimation of nature’s value, was the focus of this study. So, the aim of the current research is to develop an evaluation theory by refining approaches and methods for the economic evaluation of natural resources and ecosystem services. The research object was the evaluation practice of the former USSR, Russia, and countries outside Russia. Employing research methods of systematization and content analysis with evolutionary and ecosystem approaches, about three hundred scientific papers have been the subject of this review. The study (1) reveals the evolutionary changes in economic evaluation approaches and methods of natural resources and ecosystem services; (2) discloses the features of the existing classifications of economic evaluation methods; and (3) offers the author's classification, which is based on the five classification criteria: evaluation type, evaluation approaches, evaluation character (nature), evaluation methods, and market discourse. We believe that understanding the development of scientific thought about evaluation methods and their classifications will make it possible to increase the reliability of the estimation results in natural resource and environmental economics.

Nowadays, circular economy (CE) is on the agenda, however, this concept of closed supply chains originated in the 1960s. The current growing quantity of studies in this area accounts for different discourses except the holistic one, which mixes both approaches—contextual and operating (contextual approach utilizes the thorough examination of the CE theory, stricture of the policy, etc.; the operating one uses any kind of statistical data)—to assess the capacity of circular economy regulatory policy packages (CERPP) in operating raw materials and industrial wastes. This article demonstrates new guidelines for assessing the degree level of capacity (DLC) of CERPPs in the operation of raw materials and industrial wastes by utilizing the apparatus of the fuzzy set theory. It scrupulously surveys current CERPPs in three regions: the EU overall, Finland and Russia; and assesses for eight regions—the EU overall, Finland, Russia, China, Greece, France, the Netherlands and South Korea—the DLC of CERPPs in operating raw materials and industrial wastes. The results show that EU is the best in CE policy and its CERPP is 3R. The following are South Korea and China with the same type of CERPP. Finland, France and the Netherlands have worse results than EU with the type of CERPP called “integrated waste management” because of the absence of a waste hierarchy (reduce, recover, recycle). Russia closes the list with the type of CERPP “basic waste management”.