A taxonomy of circular economy indicators
By M. Saidani, B. Yannou, Y. Leroy, François Cluzel, Alissa Kendall. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2018
893 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Implementing circular economy (CE) principles is increasingly recommended as a convenient solution to meet the goals of sustainable development. New tools are required to support practitioners, decision-makers and policy-makers towards more CE practices, as well as to monitor the effects of CE adoption. Worldwide, academics, industrialists and politicians all agree on the need to use CE-related measuring instruments to manage this transition at different systemic levels. In this context, a wide range of circularity indicators (C-indicators) has been developed in recent years. Yet, as there is not one single definition of the CE concept, it is of the utmost importance to know what the available indicators measure in order to use them properly. Indeed, through a systematic literature review – considering both academic and grey literature – 55 sets of C-indicators, developed by scholars, consulting companies and governmental agencies, have been identified, encompassing different purposes, scopes, and potential usages. Inspired by existing taxonomies of eco-design tools and sustainability indicators, and in line with the CE characteristics, a classification of indicators aiming to assess, improve, monitor and communicate on the CE performance is proposed and discussed. In the developed taxonomy including 10 categories, C-indicators are differentiated regarding criteria such as the levels of CE implementation (e.g. micro, meso, macro), the CE loops (maintain, reuse, remanufacture, recycle), the performance (intrinsic, impacts), the perspective of circularity (actual, potential) they are taking into account, or their degree of transversality (generic, sector-specific). In addition, the database inventorying the 55 sets of C-indicators is linked to an Excel-based query tool to facilitate the selection of appropriate indicators according to the specific user's needs and requirements. This study enriches the literature by giving a first need-driven taxonomy of C-indicators, which is experienced on several use cases. It provides a synthesis and clarification to the emerging and must-needed research theme of C-indicators, and sheds some light on remaining key challenges like their effective uptake by industry. Eventually, limitations, improvement areas, as well as implications of the proposed taxonomy are intently addressed to guide future research on C-indicators and CE implementation.
Subfields: Building and Construction, Marketing, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9bf895c62aaffb08f4e693e98081284c212ce11
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Building and Construction
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Circular Economy Concept in the Context of Economic Development in EU Countries (2020, background): “[57] provided a synthesis and 36 clarification to the emerging and must-needed research theme of circular economy indicators and shed some light on 37 remaining key challenges, like their effective uptake by industry.”
- 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).”
- Systematic Literature Reviews: An Introduction (2019, background): “ Explain clearly what literature was searched and how (see, for instance, (Saidani et al., 2019) for an example of how this can be done simply).”
- Circular Economy Strategies in Eight Historic Port Cities: Criteria and Indicators Towards a Circular City Assessment Framework (2019, background): “Recent research efforts in systematizing existing indicators of circularity at the micro, meso, and macro levels have resulted in a taxonomy of 55 indicators sets [139], of which 19 are developed at the scale of cities, regions, and nations.”
- Prioritization of sustainability indicators for promoting the circular economy: The case of developing countries (2019, background): “[20] Proposed a set of need-driven taxonomy for CE”
- A Critical Review of Academic Approaches, Methods and Tools to Assess Circular Economy at the Micro Level (2020, methodology): “This firm-perspective of the micro level will still include many different levels of scale, such as manufacturing plants [34], products [24] or suppliers, producers, consumers, and designers [12,20].”