Abstract
The goal of the circular economy (CE) is to transition from today's take-make-waste linear pattern of production and consumption to a circular system in which the societal value of products, materials, and resources is maximized over time. Yet circularity in and of itself does not ensure social, economic, and environmental performance (i.e., sustainability). Sustainability of CE strategies needs to be measured against their linear counterparts to identify and avoid strategies that increase circularity yet lead to unintended externalities. The state of the practice in quantitatively comparing sustainability impacts of circular to linear systems is one of experimentation with various extant methods developed in other fields and now applied here. While the proliferation of circularity metrics has received considerable attention, to-date, there is no critical review of the methods and combinations of methods that underlie those metrics and that specifically quantify sustainability impacts of circular strategies. Our critical review herein analyzes identified methods according to six criteria: temporal resolution, scope, data requirements, data granularity, capacity for measuring material efficiency potentials, and sustainability completeness. Results suggest that the industrial ecology and complex systems science fields could prove complementary when assessing the sustainability of the transition to a CE. Both fields include quantitative methods differing primarily with regard to their inclusion of temporal aspects and material efficiency potentials. Moreover, operations research methods such as multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) may alleviate the common contradictions which often exist between circularity metrics. This review concludes by suggesting guidelines for selecting quantitative methods most appropriate to a particular research question and making the argument that while there are a variety of existing methods, additional research is needed to combine existing methods and develop a more holistic approach for assessing sustainability impacts of CE strategies.
Highlights
Driven in part by the growth of renewable energy technologies and the expansion of information and communication technologies, the demand for critical materials is rising (Graedel and Cao, 2010; Knoeri et al, 2013; Deetman et al, 2018)
In order to provide guidelines to circular economy (CE) stakeholders such as policy-makers, scholars, entrepreneurs, non-profits organizations, we analyzed the methods presented in each article we found through the literature review and we assessed their ability to model the CE
Because of its broader scope, the CE indicators covering the material footprint of European Union (EU) members is based on Material flow analysis (MFA); the product environmental footprint category rules are based on Life cycle assessment (LCA) and the circular footprint formula (Zampori and Pant, 2019)
Summary
Driven in part by the growth of renewable energy technologies and the expansion of information and communication technologies, the demand for critical materials is rising (Graedel and Cao, 2010; Knoeri et al, 2013; Deetman et al, 2018). The authors found that many CE studies strive to include several lifecycle stages in the analysis and that most methods are only focusing on the environmental aspect of sustainability Their analysis confirms the findings of Parchomenko et al (2019) that the use of materials is the variable that is most often studied in the literature on CE assessment. There is currently no approach designed to quantitatively assess the sustainability of the transition toward a more circular economy and, various methods from different fields have been applied for that purpose It is quite a critical matter as increased circularity does not necessarily lead to sustainability benefits [e.g., if a material with recycled content cause more environmental impacts than another virgin material (Vendries et al, 2020) or if recycling is done informally, causing health and social impacts (Umair et al, 2013; Arushanyan et al, 2014)]. Ascertain whether the development of new circularity assessment method(s) is needed
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