Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review
By E. Iacovidou, C. Velis, P. Purnell, Oliver Zwirner, Andrew Brown, J. Hahladakis, J. Millward-Hopkins, Paul T. Williams. 2017
272 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Established assessment methods focusing on resource recovery from waste within a circular economy context consider few or even a single domain/s of value, i.e. environmental, economic, social and technical domains. This partial approach often delivers misleading messages for policy- and decision-makers. It fails to accurately represent systems complexity, and obscures impacts, trade-offs and problem shifting that resource recovery processes or systems intended to promote circular economy may cause. Here, we challenge such partial approaches by critically reviewing the existing suite of environmental, economic, social and technical metrics that have been regularly observed and used in waste management and resource recovery systems' assessment studies, upstream and downstream of the point where waste is generated. We assess the potential of those metrics to evaluate ‘complex value’ of materials, components and products, i.e., the holistic sum of their environmental, economic, social and technical benefits and impacts across the system. Findings suggest that the way resource recovery systems are assessed and evaluated require simplicity, yet must retain a suitable minimum level of detail across all domains of value, which is pivotal for enabling sound decision-making processes. Criteria for defining a suitable set of metrics for assessing resource recovery from waste require them to be simple, transparent and easy to measure, and be both system- and stakeholder-specific. Future developments must focus on providing a framework for the selection of metrics that accurately describe (or at least reliably proxy for) benefits and impacts across all domains of value, enabling effective and transparent analysis of resource recovery form waste in circular economy systems.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d6169263eb2c760d6dda1c4a0290f1a5c52b0b88
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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
- J. Hahladakis
- J. Millward-Hopkins
- E. Iacovidou
- P. Purnell
- Andrew Brown
- Oliver Zwirner
- Alissa Kendall
- C. Velis
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Evaluating Circular Economy under a Multi-Parametric Approach: A Technological Review (2019, background): “Namely, the requirements of sources of waste feedstock in terms of scale, quality of input and output, site location and area, operational management skills, and capital and operating costs have to be thoroughly considered [20].”
- A pathway to circular economy: Developing a conceptual framework for complex value assessment of resources recovered from waste (2017, methodology): “Some approaches put more emphasis on reducing the amount of resources entering the waste stream and of their associated environmental impacts (e.g. through redesigning components and products, or altering the production and consumption processes across all stages of MCPs lifecycle), while others put”
- A taxonomy of circular economy indicators (2018, background): “For example, Janin (2000) determined two main categories: environmental assessment and improvement.”
- Assessing scaling effects of circular economy strategies: A case study on plastic bottle closed-loop recycling in the USA PET market (2020, methodology): “Recently, a plethora of new tools and methods dedicated to CE assessment have emerged in the literature, as reported in recent reviews (Corona et al., 2019; Elia et al., 2017; Iacovidou et al., 2017; Moraga et al., 2019; Parchomenko et al., 2019; Saidani et al., 2018).”
- Addressing the Social Aspects of a Circular Economy: A Systematic Literature Review (2020, background): “, [33,34]); this could be attributed to concurrence of the CE implementation.”