Circular Economy: Theoretical Benchmark or Perpetual Motion Machine?

By Jonathan M. Cullen. 2017

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9266df19b6f164d17f1cd2b8d7e22611d4aa5048

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Citations in the corpus

Targets for a circular economy (2020, background): “It requires transportation, as well as physical, chemical, and/or mechanical treatments (Cullen, 2017; Jensen et al., 2011).”
Circular economy in cities: Reviewing how environmental research aligns with local practices (2018, background): “material circulation is known to produce a degradation of the material quality and quantity, requiring additional energy and resource inputs that are often disregarded (Cullen, 2017).”
Analysing European Union circular economy policies: words versus actions (2020, background): “A CE can thus increase the demand for highemperature heat, which is hard to obtain from renewable sources f energy ( Cullen, 2017 ).”
Critiques of the circular economy (2021, unknown): “Dissipation in the environment (Cullen, 2017), contamination (Baxter et al., 2017), and wearing down of materials (Parrique et al., 2019) all set limits on how circular any economy can become.”
A Critical Review of Academic Approaches, Methods and Tools to Assess Circular Economy at the Micro Level (2020, background): “One of the primary goals of establishing a CE has been described as decoupling global economic development from finite resource consumption by introducing closed resource loops, leading to reduced environmental degradation and positive social impacts while stimulating economic growth [5,6].”
Circular economy indicators: What do they measure? (2019, background): “CE is an umbrella concept (Blomsma and Brennan, 2017; CIRAIG, 2015; Homrich et al., 2018) that includes lowering material input and minimising waste generation (EASAC, 2016; EEA, 2016) to decouple economic growth from natural resource use (Cullen, 2017; EASAC, 2016; Pauliuk, 2018).”
Conceptualizing the circular economy: An analysis of 114 definitions (2017, methodology): “(2015), Hobson (2016), Cullen (2017) Goldberg (2017), Moreau et al. (2017), Niero et al.”
On the Circular Bioeconomy and Decoupling: Implications for Sustainable Growth (2019, background): “As observed by Cullen (Cullen, 2017) (p. 483): “A Circular Economy future is one in which waste no longer exists, one where material loops are closed, and where products are recycled indefinitely— an economy that perpetually gyrates without any input of depletable resources.”