Circular Economy and the Transition to a Sustainable Society: Integrated Assessment Methods for a New Paradigm

Abstract

The circular economy concept has recently gained prominence in political debate and corporate discourse around the world as a pathway towards sustainability. The academic debate is characterised by several and sometimes very contrasting definitions of the concept. We claim here that the issue is not finding silver-bullet solutions that will simultaneously support population growth, increasing affluence and environmental resource regeneration. We argue that a clearer definition is needed for the circular economy concept, in terms of strategies, objectives, future states and stakeholders’ needs. Also, assessment methods need to be developed for keeping track of the transition towards a circular economy. Within this context, this paper establishes the need for a multi-stakeholder, multi-dimensional and multi-criteria approach for the evaluation of the transition towards a circular economy across different time and spatial scales, as well as multiple sustainability dimensions.

Digital battery passports to enable circular and sustainable value chains: conceptualization and use cases

“…Alamerew and Brissaud, 2020). With respect to circular value chains, there is the perception that they potentially yield various sustainability-related benefits (e.g., securing critical raw material supplies, increase of social equity, relief of environmental stresses) when compared to traditional linear ones (e.g., Buruzs and Torma, 2017;Millar et al, 2019;Oliveira et al, 2021). This in turn could facilitate SPM efforts (cf.…”

“…However, a more circular value chain does not necessarily equate to a more sustainable one, thus requiring the investigation of circular value chains and corresponding products with respect to their sustainability performance (cf. Kirchherr et al, 2017;Oliveira et al, 2021;Schöggl et al, 2020). An assessment of the sustainability and circularity performance on product level requires high-quality data (e.g., energy, emissions, and waste-related data), and practical tools (cf.…”

“…It is further assumed that performance-, technical-, and safety-related requirements are prioritized over sustainability and circularity-related ones (e.g., Chen et al, 2020;Hirz and Brunner, 2015). The presented use case "value chain development" was developed by consulting publications with a focus on digitalization in the context of sustainable and/or circular supply chain management (e.g., Bai and Sarkis, 2020;Barykin et al, 2020;Esmaeilian et al, 2020;Ivanov and Dolgui, 2020;Kouhizadeh et al, 2021;Marmolejo-Saucedo and Hartmann, 2020), product life cycle management (Talkhestani et al, 2018), and sustainability and circular economy (Oliveira et al, 2021).…”

“…This allows DBP users to gain a comprehensive understanding about aforementioned performance (cf. Oliveira et al, 2021;Saidani et al, 2019). Using one indicator only might lead to distortion of decision-making situations, due to one indicator most likely not being able to capture and represent the complexity of sustainability and circular economy (cf.…”

Considerations Related to the Application of the EU Water Reuse Regulation to the Production of Snow from Reclaimed Water

“…The idea is developing very quickly. There is no doubt as to the correctness of this path; however, there are a lot of controversies related to the very definition of the circular economy and its appropriate development [20]. The circular economy is comparable to ecological modernization, trying to reconcile the economy and the environment for lasting results [21].…”