Handbook of the circular economy: Transitions and transformation : Book review

Abstract

[Alexander, A., Pascucci, S. & Charnley, F. (eds., 2023). Handbook of the circular economy: Transitions and transformation. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston. 504 pp. ISBN 978-3-11-072322-9] Since the term “circular economy” emerged in the economic and environ-mental literature at the beginning of the 2010’s, an ever-growing number of articles, papers, reports and books have been published on this new concept that aims at the ending of the so-called linear economy and ushering into a new economic paradigm. The circular economy’s foundations lay on several schools of thought of the past almost sixty years which pro-mote closed-loop systems and nature-inspired metabolisms in the econ-omy, starting from Boulding’s seminal work “The Economics of the Com-ing Spaceship Earth” (1966) through Stahel’s “Product-Life Factor” (1982) and Pearce and Turner’s “Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment” (1994), until McDonough and Braungart’s „Cradle to Cradle” (2002) or Gradel and Allenby’s “Industrial Ecology” (2003) – just to name a few. Since the term “circular economy” was born in the past dec-ade, this concept has been a popular subject of the economic, business, environmental, technical and even popular literature (Freed & Ritchie, 2021).