How Circular is the Global Economy?: An Assessment of Material Flows, Waste Production, and Recycling in the European Union and the World in 2005

By W. Haas, F. Krausmann, Dominik Wiedenhofer, Markus Heinz. 2015

972 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is increasingly recognized that the growing metabolism of society is approaching limitations both with respect to sources for resource inputs and sinks for waste and emission outflows. The circular economy (CE) is a simple, but convincing, strategy, which aims at reducing both input of virgin materials and output of wastes by closing economic and ecological loops of resource flows. This article applies a sociometabolic approach to assess the circularity of global material flows. All societal material flows globally and in the European Union (EU‐27) are traced from extraction to disposal and presented for main material groups for 2005. Our estimate shows that while globally roughly 4 gigatonnes per year (Gt/yr) of waste materials are recycled, this flow is of moderate size compared to 62 Gt/yr of processed materials and outputs of 41 Gt/yr. The low degree of circularity has two main reasons: First, 44% of processed materials are used to provide energy and are thus not available for recycling. Second, socioeconomic stocks are still growing at a high rate with net additions to stocks of 17 Gt/yr. Despite having considerably higher end‐of‐life recycling rates in the EU, the overall degree of circularity is low for similar reasons. Our results indicate that strategies targeting the output side (end of pipe) are limited given present proportions of flows, whereas a shift to renewable energy, a significant reduction of societal stock growth, and decisive eco‐design are required to advance toward a CE.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/856aa3e6499d688cb0319ab642bf11056387f6e5

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Citations in the corpus

The Relevance of Circular Economy Practices to the Sustainable Development Goals (2019, background): “Although the degree of circularity within the EU economy is twice as high as the global average—about 13% of processed materials—it is still low (Haas et al. 2015).”
The smart circular economy: A digital-enabled circular strategies framework for manufacturing companies (2020, neutral): “At present, the adoption of circular strategies in industry is somewhat modest (Circle Economy, 2020; Haas, Krausmann, Wiedenhofer, & Heinz, 2015; Planing, 2015; Sousa-Zomer, Magalhães, Zancul, & Cauchick-Miguel, 2018).”
Circular Economy: The Concept and its Limitations (2016, background): “…2012), cleaner production (Stevenson and Evans, 2004) including reviews on manufacturing systems' circular materials flows and developments to that end (Lieder and Rashid, 2016), product-service systems (Tukker, 2015), eco-efficiency (Huppes and Ishikawa, 2009; Welford, 1998a; Haas et al., 2015.)”
Socially sustainable degrowth as a social–ecological transformation: repoliticizing sustainability (2015, background): “…the possibility that some ideas, such as the dematerialization of the world’s economy (UNEP 2011), ecological modernization, green growth (Martinez-Alier 2014; Latouche 2009; Gómez-Baggethun and Naredo 2015, this feature) and the circular economy (Haas et al. 2015) fulfil their promises.”
The circular economy: New or Refurbished as CE 3.0? — Exploring Controversies in the Conceptualization of the Circular Economy through a Focus on History and Resource Value Retention Options (2017, background): “The first study that tries to measure global circularity comes from Haas et al. (2015) and takes 2005 as a reference year.”