Abstract
The environmental benefits of the circular economy (CE) are often taken for granted. There are, however, reasons to believe that rebound effects may counteract such benefits by increasing overall consumption or ‘growing the pie’. In this study, we focus on two main rebound mechanisms: (1) imperfect substitution between ‘re-circulated’ (recycled, reused, etc.) and new products and (2) re-spending due to economic savings. We use the case study of smartphone reuse in the US to quantify, for the first time, rebound effects from reuse. Using a combination of life cycle assessment, sales statistics, consumer surveying, consumer demand modelling, and environmentally-extended input-output analysis, we quantify the magnitude of this rebound effect for life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions. We find a rebound effect of 29% on average, with a range of 27% to 46% for specific smartphone models. Moreover, when exploring how rebound might play out in other regions and under different consumer behaviour patterns, we find that rebound effects could be higher than 100% (backfire effect). In other words, we estimate that about one third, and potentially the entirety, of emission savings resulting from smartphone reuse could be lost due to the rebound effect. Our results thus suggest that there are grounds to challenge the premise that CE strategies, and reuse in particular, always reduce environmental burdens.
Highlights
The circular economy (CE) aims to minimize resource use and emissions by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy flow loops (Bocken et al, 2016)
We examine some of the unintended environmental consequences of the CE by quantifying rebound effects from both imperfect substitution and re-spending effects arising from direct market reuse of smartphones
Our results show that the environmental rebound effect” (ERE) from both re-spending and imperfect substitution entails a noteworthy reduction in the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) emission savings resulting from reusing the selected iPhone models
Summary
The circular economy (CE) aims to minimize resource use and emissions by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy flow loops (Bocken et al, 2016). While some evidence supports the environmental benefits of the CE (Ghisellini et al, 2016; Cooper and Gutowski, 2017) concerns have been raised regarding potential undesirable outcomes of a CE. These include the physical and economic limits of recycling activities (Reck and Graedel, 2012; Allwood, 2014) the environmental desirability of reused products (Gutowski et al, 2011; Skelton and Allwood, 2013; Ovchinnikov et al, 2014; Zink et al, 2014), and the so-called rebound effect (Zink and Geyer, 2017). Rebound effects can be associated with changes in environmental efficiency, such as less resource inputs for delivering a given function (Font Vivanco et al, 2016b)
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