Preamble
If the circular economy is the solution, then what is the problem?
There are many answers to this question, with the scope of the problem helping dictate the level of change required in order to address it.
A conventional answer is that the circular economy is a means of addressing the problems of harm to the environment, and to resource security and resource efficiency, associated with the extraction and disposal elements of a ‘take-make-dispose’ (i.e. ‘linear’) economy. Through this lens, the circular economy is primarily delivered through measures such as better product design to increase product longevity, reusability and recyclability, and the circular economy could be seen as being primarily focused on allowing continued or more widespread growth despite the planet only having finite resources.
However, as was made clear by the discussion panel for the launch of the Circularity Gap Report 2022, which featured many circular economy ‘thought leaders’, there is a great richness in terms of the concepts that underpin the circular economy and this makes it difficult to accurately measure how ‘circular’ the economy is at any given point in time without missing or over-emphasizing one element of the circular economy over another. This complexity also makes it difficult to definitively determine how ‘circular’ a proposed measure or direction of travel could be said to be.
For example, if the only aspects which are addressed are the preservation of materials and nutrients (and in some definitions energy) in order to address resource security and maximise production efficiency, would this deliver and maximise social and environmental benefits? Could focussing on these ‘economic’ goals in isolation have undesirable adverse impacts? Could it add undeserved legitimacy to unsustainable and undesirable practises?
Is the circular economy trying to address wider problems with our current economic model and to maximise social and environmental gains, or is it just trying to overcome the constraints inherent in a linear economy while being indifferent to whether or not the new economic model replicates or worsens other existing problems (like climate change) or misses key opportunities (such as addressing inequality)? To what extent is the circular economy transformative and to what extent does it perpetuate business as usual?
Is it necessary to add clarifiers, such as “a just transition to a sustainable low-carbon circular economy”, or are such concepts fundamental to what is meant by the circular economy in the first place?
There are countless ways to define the scope, meaning and purpose of a transition to a more circular economy. Rather than trying to come up with one single definition, this page explores a number of concepts and terms which have been used by those trying to explain, explore, promote and critique the circular economy. For those wanting to explore these and other concepts in more detail, please see the documents available on the Further Reading page.
The Circular Economy
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a key proponent of the circular economy, argues that the circular economy is based on three principles: “design out waste and pollution; keep products and materials in use; regenerate natural systems”.
The UK Government’s 2018 Resources and Waste Strategy talks about the circular economy in the following terms: “Our goal is to move to a more circular economy which keeps resources in use for longer – for that to happen, we must all reduce, reuse and recycle more than we do now…A more circular economy will see us keeping resources in use as long as possible, so we extract maximum value from them. We should recover and regenerate products and materials whenever we can, giving them a new lease of life.”
The Resources and Waste Strategy sets out the following three environmental indicators which the UK Government associates directly with the level of circularity and which Government wants to see go downwards:
- Carbon footprint of shopping basket of consumer products: “We need to ensure that the level of emissions associated with what we typically consume declines over time to reflect reductions in the carbon intensity of materials and successful design for longevity and circularity.”
- Total waste generated: “We want to minimise the amount of waste we create because a portion of it will be lost to the circular economy and so have to be replaced by using virgin materials with associated carbon emissions. Or, where it is recycled, it will entail emissions that could have been avoided if the waste had not been generated in the first place.”
- Total residual waste generated per capita: “We want to minimise the amount of residual waste that we create because it is a loss to the circular economy and so will have to be replaced by using virgin materials with associated carbon emissions. Residual waste is also an indicator of avoidable waste in that residual waste will include material that could have been recycled.”
In line with the final indicator, the UK Government’s proposed target to reduce waste going to landfill and incineration by 50% by 2042 based on 2019 base levels is said to be a measure to promote the circular economy. According to the UK Government’s Impact Assessment for the measure: “Government intervention to divert materials from residual waste treatment will improve the circularity of the economy and therefore increase recycling”.
In her May 2022 article entitled ‘Building our circular economy in Midlothian and beyond‘ Lorna Slater, Scottish Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity, explained that the circular economy: “means an economy based on re-use and sharing, the elimination of waste, and ensuring that things are built to last”.
As noted in a joint Government policy statement, the UK Government and the devolved administrations’ perspectives on what is meant by the circular economy and how it can be achieved could be said to be influenced by the European approach to the matter, including the European Commission’s Circular Economy Package.
One of the seminal speeches on the concept of the circular economy came from the then European Commissioner for Environment Janez Potočnik, who in a 2012 speech on ‘Achieving a sustainable economy’ stated:
Throughout its evolution and diversification, our industrial economy has scarcely moved beyond the fundamental characteristic established in the early days of industrialisation: a linear model of resource consumption that follows that ‘take-make-use-throw away’ pattern. Today in Europe we use 16 tons of materials per capita annually, of which 6 tons become waste, and half of that waste is then landfilled.
This linear model was feasible for as long as only a fairly small proportion of the world was growing rich. Fortunately today many more billions are on a path to comfortable middle-class consumer lifestyles. And fortunately our companies will be able to satisfy many of those new markets. But unlimited growth on a limited planet means that this linear approach will inevitably lead to scarcity, price-volatility, supply disruptions and pricing levels that are unaffordable for our economy’s industrial base. This is particularly problematic for Europe, where we are heavily import dependent for our materials.
The answer is, instead of burying or burning those materials at the end of their life, to pump them back into the economy. To move to a circular economy. Our technological and innovation challenge for the next Century is to achieve prosperity in a world of finite resources.
There are overlaps between this concept of the circular economy and related concepts such as:
- Cradle to Cradle. The 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart challenged the notion of creating products which have a definitive end to their lifecycle (‘cradle-to-grave’) and argues instead that: “Everything can be designed to be disassembled and safely returned to the soil as biological nutrients, or re-utilized as high quality materials for new products as technical nutrients without contamination“. The book criticises ‘reduce re-use and recycle’ methods as encouraging a ‘cradle-to-grave’ patterns and sets out how products should be designed to be ‘upcycled‘ rather than ‘downcycled‘ (i.e. subsequently used in products of higher rather than lower value and functionality). The book also argues that when energy is needed it should make use of abundant, clean and renewable sources such as wind and solar.
- Resource Efficiency. As the European Commission puts it: “Resource efficiency means using the Earth’s limited resources in a sustainable manner while minimising impacts on the environment. It allows us to create more with less and to deliver greater value with less input”.
- Zero Waste. The Zero Waste International Alliance defined ‘Zero Waste’ in 2018 as: “The conservation of all resources by means of responsible production, consumption, reuse, and recovery of products, packaging, and materials without burning and with no discharges to land, water, or air that threaten the environment or human health”.
According to the historian Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch: “The term ‘zero waste’ was first publicly used in industry. Paul Palmer, a chemist with a PhD from Yale who later became the founding director of the Zero Waste Institute in Vacaville, California, coined the term in the 1970s. His interest in zero waste was scientific and monetary rather than ecological. Palmer noticed that high-tech businesses in the newly emerging Silicon Valley were discarding valuable ‘clean’ chemicals that could be reused. As a result he started a company that marketed waste products; over time his company identified new uses for every chemical discarded in the Silicon Valley. Palmer’s definition of zero waste is based on the principle that articles should be reused instead of used once and then discarded. Zero waste, unlike recycling, is thus not an end-of-pipe strategy; it implies the recovery of all resources instead of burning or burying them.”
In June 2026, a GAIA blog post shared their perspective that: “Zero waste is guided by the goal of progressively reducing disposal in landfills and incinerators, a yardstick for judging the effectiveness of waste programs and policies. As a vision, its ultimate objective is to change how we produce, consume and process discards so our materials economy fits within planetary boundaries….Every time a waste‑to‑energy or plastics‑to‑fuel project is presented as ‘zero waste,’ authorities in the field must set the record straight.” - Closed Loop Economy and Functional Service Economy. The Swiss architect Walter Stahel helped popularise the ‘closed loop’ concept through his 1982 paper ‘The Product-Life Factor’, which promoted the idea of a “spiral-loop system” (explained as a “response to oil price shocks and high unemployment in Europe”). His 2006 paper ‘The Performance Economy’ (updated in 2010) advocates moving away from a production-based model into one focused on providing the service or benefit of a product.
Circular Citizenship
‘Circular citizenship’ is a term that draws on the notion of ‘active citizenship’ as applied to the way people can deliberately choose to be more prudent and less wasteful.
In broad terms, active citizenship encompasses what is known as the ‘community and voluntary sector’, that is all of the voluntary (unpaid) efforts people make to contribute to their communities.
One way that ‘active citizenship’ is described by the Open University is: “the practice of people being engaged in and informed about what happens in their communities and across the country. It also means people being empowered to use their voices to try to effect change and to shape the decisions that affect them”.
According to the changesuk.net website, active citizenship includes: “active learning for political literacy and empowerment, addressing structures and relations of power and working to change these, where necessary, in the pursuit of social inclusion and social justice agendas…It also relates to how people can promote community cohesion and social solidarity, thereby strengthening civil society as well as empowering individual citizens”.
By extension, circular citizenship relates to the way that people seek to understand and engage in processes and systems connected to waste management and resource use.
In January 2024 The University of Groningen in the Netherlands published initial findings of their research into ‘How values, beliefs, and norms influence circular consumption and citizenship behaviours’. They describe how ‘circular citizenship behaviours’ are “behaviours that aim to influence other actors (such as governments, businesses, and other citizens) to take actions that contribute to systemic change towards a circular economy”.
This is a good match for the way that the Circularity Foundation uses the term ‘circular citizenship’.
Internalising externalities and addressing market failures
Perverse financial incentives could be seen as encouraging the ‘extraction’ and ‘disposal’ elements of the linear economy as well as failing to reward the benefits of avoided harm from the circular economy. As someone from the reuse sector in Sweden put it: “The fact that negative environmental externalities for the extraction of virgin material is not accounted for in the pricing of new products sends the wrong signals to the market”.
An externality exists when the price of performing an action does not reflect the harm or benefit it causes to third parties. In 2011 the UK Government provided an example of an externality existing “where the environmental cost of different options is not included in market prices” and stated that this was a type of ‘market failure’ (i.e. inefficiency in the free market).
Both environmental and economic externalities have been cited as barriers to the circular economy. For example, a report produced for the OECD (‘The Circular Economy: What, Why, How and Where’) listed “incomplete pricing of externalities” as one of eight barriers to resource efficiency and a circular economy. In 2020 Youmatter listed externalities as one of five examples of economic barriers to a circular economy model, stating: “Social and environmental externalities are not considered in prices, privileging financial market signals instead of people and nature when economic decisions are made”. Similarly, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has stated that regenerative natural systems are key to the circular economy and that in a sense this principle “is about developing the systems’ effectiveness by revealing and designing out negative externalities”.
This concept has also been explained using the concepts of ‘true cost’ and ‘true price’. For example, social entrepreneur Michel Scholte said in 2019 that: “Despite the growth of sustainability labels and organic products in shops, not a single shopping basket is truly circular and in line with the SDGs…If these true costs are the problem, then true prices are the solution. The true price of a product is its market price plus the cost of repairing social and environmental damage wrought through the value chain. This includes the damage caused by pollution, climate change, resource extraction, and harm to workers. For example, the true price includes the cost of planting trees to absorb carbon or the costs associated with cleaning the water used in the production process”.
Focussing on the environmental externalities, the UK Government noted in 2011 that: “Failing to price in the environmental cost and benefit of generating waste leads to inefficient production and consumption patterns, and excess waste being produced…Without government intervention, waste treatment options with better environmental performance may be penalised relative to treatments with poorer performance. Accounting for the environmental impact requires that the costs of various treatment options and levels of the hierarchy fully reflect the costs to society of each option.”
The idea of internalising externalities to promote ‘better’ behaviour can be found underpinning principles such as ‘producer pays’ and ‘polluter pays’ that justify measures associated with the transition to a more circular economy, such as Extended Producer Responsibility, the landfill tax and the plastics tax.
A linked concept is the idea of the ‘true cost’ or the ‘true price’ of a product. As social entrepreneur Michel Scholte puts it, “The true price of a product is its market price plus the cost of repairing social and environmental damage wrought through the value chain.” Everything we buy has social and environmental costs, even organic jeans, local vegetables, and electric cars. If these true costs are the problem, then true prices are the solution.
The benefit of reducing negative externalities can also be seen in justifications of actions to avoid single-use products, with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation arguing for example that: “Moving from single-use to reuse not only helps eliminate plastic waste and pollution but also, if done well, offers significant reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other negative externalities”.
Redesign, longevity, and dematerialisation
As the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s learning hub page on circular design puts it: “Design sits prominently at the heart of the circular economy. It requires us to redesign everything: products, business models, cities, and the linear systems that have lasted for the past centuries…Extending the life of a product allows it to remain in use for as long as possible, one of the three core principles of circular economy. This may involve designing products to be both physically and emotionally durable or it may require innovative approaches that allow the product to adapt to a user’s changing needs as time passes…Products that resist damage and wear, or retain their emotional appeal are able to be used and reused multiple times, potentially by many different users.”
In addition to increasing product longevity, reusability and recyclability, one element of circular design is explained by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to be ‘dematerialisation’ which is the process of reducing the resource requirements of a design. They explain that: “This strategy is all about finding solutions to deliver utility using the minimum amount of material possible. This could mean finding ways to virtualise your offering, creating a digital rather than a physical product – services such as Spotify and Netflix being prime examples of this approach. It could also mean designing your product or service in such a way that it requires only a minimal amount of physical material to create.”
Another element is moving from products to services. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation: “Central to the concept of circular economy is a shift from ownership to access; understanding that customers often only require access to a product for a short period of time after which they can return it to the service provider or pass it on to a new user. A host of new businesses, built on this notion, have emerged in recent years offering all manner of products to their customers on a short term basis (through rental, subscription, sharing or leasing) rather than selling it to them forever.”
This concept of moving from products to services has been suggested for a number of goods such as furniture, cars, machines, tools, carpets, and household appliances. According to a 2021 discussion paper co-authored by experts from a range of European environmental protection agencies, Product-Service Systems “can be transformative, if producers and suppliers shift from selling goods to providing services, and in that way decrease their own and their consumers’ environmental and climate footprint. At the same time all business partners can increase their economic gain and decouple their business goals from the production of goods”.
However, that same reports warns that: “…it is not safe to assume that environmental pressure will drop steadily when systems dematerialise. Thus, a sound environmental assessment, concerning the whole product life cycle as well as both the beneficial and detrimental effects, remains necessary”.
Sufficiency, sustainable development, and ‘rebound effects’
In 1987 the United Nation’s Brundtland Commission defined Sustainable Development as: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs“.
In addition to being able to produce equivalent goods or services using fewer resources, there is also the potential to meet needs through other means which are less reliant on the use of finite resources and/or which cause less pollution.
This leads to the concept of ‘sufficiency’, which could be seen as a decoupling of the goal of a better ‘quality of life’ from the goal of unlimited economic growth driven by the consumption of physical goods and the use of natural resources.
Friends of the Earth Europe argued in 2018 that:
…the key variable to be addressed is…the sheer volume of consumption. This is what sufficiency is all about: reducing the resource consumption per capita. This is not the same as reducing people’s quality of life: while human wants are infinite, human needs are limited as an anthropological constant. Few of them are material needs; these can be served by less material intensive goods and services, for instance by sharing instead of privately owning the most inefficient durable private goods: automobiles.
….to the extent that efficient processes reduce demand for an input, the input’s price falls, and this in turn boosts demand. This is called the rebound effect and if consumption of the now more efficient input ends up at the level it was before, rebound is said to be 100%; all the energy that, say, could have been saved due to the more efficient kettles was used up for other things…
We urgently need a globally just division of resource access within environmental limits…efficiency increases are doubtlessly necessary, but they enhance growth. So they must be combined with sufficiency policies skimming off the surplus and thus eradicating the rebound effects. It is the end that counts, not the means. As there are no effective growth brakes in a free market economy, the limitations must be set from outside the economic system: politically by capping resource throughput with a shrinking cap.
Prioritising sufficiency can change business focus from creating physical products to getting the maximum value out of the products created through increased product longevity and shareability. As Carina Millstone, Executive Director of Feedback and author of the book Frugal Value, put it in 2018:
“I think we need to take a slight step back to talk about efficiency and what I call sufficiency. This is because the answer of big corporations to the environmental problem, some of them who’ve taken action, is to make their products more efficient. And by this I mean they’ve reduced greenhouse gas emissions. They have maybe improved their sourcing. These all really, really great things. They’re minimizing the environmental impact of products, per capita each product is less impactful than it used to be. However, if the firm is still growing, what we end up with is overall still a growth in environmental impact, if the growth rate is bigger than the environmental efficiency rate per unit.
Since the goal is resource use reduction overall, the question that then came to my mind was, ‘Can we think of business models that align commercial success and sufficiency?’ That is to say that if a firm’s successful, what it’s doing is it’s contributing to resource use reduction overall and not just on a unit basis. Here I identified what I think are two characteristics of artefacts of products that businesses have historically provided that would do just that: contribute to this resource use reduction overall. The first being shareability, the ability to be shared. So you have one product that is used by many different people, and clearly, you only need one product where you might have formerly needed 25, which is great. And durability, that’s the process of reducing future objects over time. You know, over a 10-year period, you may have had 10 objects needing replacement. Now a more durable item, this may be just one over the same time period.”
Building on work by Walter Stahel, William and Michael Braungart, a 2016 article by Nancy Bocken of Maastricht University and other academics placed ‘sufficiency’ within the ‘slowing’ part of the taxonomy of slowing, closing and narrowing resource loops. Bocken’s work is cited in the Circularity Gap Report 2023 as the basis for its frame work that “the key levers to transition towards a circular economy” are to ‘narrow’ (use less), ‘slow’ (use longer), ‘regenerate’ (make clean) and ‘cycle’ (use again). The Circularity Gap explains the use of ‘cycling’ rather than ‘recycling’ in their work, saying that for some materials “each cycle degrades quality and will require at least some virgin inputs”. The term ‘cycling’ could potentially also accommodate the aforementioned concepts of ‘upcycling’ and ‘downcycling’.
The European Commission published an Impact Assessment Report on 30th November 2022 associated with a proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council on packaging and packaging waste, amending Regulation (EU) 2019/1020, and repealing Directive 94/62/EC. This featured the following:
“The current recycling of waste is dominated by downcycling, where the recycled material is of lower quality and functionality than the original material and the original functionality must be replaced by virgin material (e.g. when plastic packaging is recycled into garden furniture or glass into filling material in road building). Instead, high quality recycling allows the recyclate to be used in the same way (‘closed loop recycling’)”.
Sustainable consumption and production patterns, or fulfilling global needs within planetary boundaries
According to the United Nations (UN), the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are “the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”.
Various commentators have highlighted the role that the circular economy can play to help deliver a number of these goals, especially SDG 12, which is to “Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”. Targets related to SDG 12 includes the 2030 targets to “substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse” and to “achieve the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources”.
Another way of looking at the concept of sustainable consumption and production patterns is through the ‘One Planet’ lens. For example, when the Welsh Government set out its progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals it highlighted that in 2009 the country adopted ‘One Wales: One Planet’, a Sustainable Development Scheme which “has an objective that within the lifetime of a generation, Wales should use only its fair share of the earth’s resources, with its ecological footprint reduced to the global average availability of resources of 1.88 global hectares per person (the global availability of resources in 2007)”. According to One Wales: One Planet, “To achieve this goal over a generation, we will need to reduce by at least two thirds the total resources we currently use to sustain our lifestyles”.
While the One Planet concept is often expressed as how many planets it would take to sustain the lifestyle of each country’s average citizen, this concept is sometimes expressed within the context of ‘overshoot’. For example, Earth Overshoot Day “marks the date when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year” and this is tracked for every year. In 2022 Overshoot Day was estimated to be on December 25th back in 1971 but by 2022 was only the 28th July.
Providing a more detailed exploration of these concepts, the Circularity Gap 2023 provided its own ‘planetary boundaries framework’, which indented nine boundaries and then categorised them as being considered ‘safe’ (stratospheric ozone depletion; freshwater consumption), ‘close to overshooting’ (ocean acidification), or ‘overshot’ (biodiversity loss; chemical pollution and release of novel entities; climate change’ land system change and biogeochemical flows: cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus). Such boundaries were then used to illustrate the extent to which identified ‘circular solutions’ could reverse or prevent overshoots of planetary boundaries.
The enthusiasm about the potential for the circular economy to achieve greater fairness in the use of resources can be seen, for example, in the statement from the Permanent Mission of Greece to the UN that: “The new model of circular economy is meant to allow the planet to breathe, while leaving no one behind. By decoupling economic growth from resource use, setting global standards in product sustainability, keeping resource use within planetary boundaries and promoting the re-use of materials, circular economy may be the only sustainable economic model for the future. Not only could it lead to a healthier planet and more prosperous humankind in the long term, but it could also create jobs and new business models in the very near future.”
The academics Anne P.M. Velenturf and Phil Purnell from the Resource Recovery from Waste research programme at the University of Leeds argued in their 2021 paper ‘Principles for a sustainable circular economy’ that the circular economy can, if implemented correctly, “enable a significant number of targets under the UN Sustainable Development Goals”.
However, they also warned about the emergence of unsustainable “pseudo-circular” practices that are promoted by some as part of the circular economy because “a limited conceptual grounding and weak connection to sustainable development have allowed ‘circular economy solutions’ to be put forward which have adverse effects on sustainability”.
According to the authors: “Sustainability science is rooted in concerns around resource overexploitation and environmental decline during continued growth. Circular economy stems from the same founding literature but brings together diverse concepts, leading circular economy to have a pluralist definition with the only collective focus being improved resource use”.
The authors set out three general classifications which highlight the diversity of perspectives on what is meant by the circular economy which exist on a continuum from the perpetuation and entrenchment of unsustainable ‘business-as-usual’ to delivering significant and genuine sustainable change:
1. A circular economy relying on ‘closing loops’ with energy-from-waste [i.e. waste incineration], requiring minimal changes in production and consumption. It destroys products and materials that are then replaced, with associated environmental consequences. This model holds limited sustainability benefits and is arguably not ‘circular’, but was articulated by parts of the resources sector and government.
2. A circular economy that maximises resource recovery with recycling and landfill-mining technologies, requiring changes to production (design for recycling) and waste collections, but leaving consumption patterns the same. Recovering and recycling materials is likely to induce energy and/or water demand, and loss of materials in consecutive cycles is inevitable. This model represented the most common ground.
3. Models that recognise the low sustainability of 1 and 2, and that prioritise waste prevention, reuse, repair and remanufacturing, were grouped under an economy that is circular by design. This requires far-reaching changes in production, consumption and waste management, and collaboration and coordination to visualise implementation.
A key difference between these models of the circular economy could be said to be the extent to which they bring about sustainable consumption and production patterns and fulfil global needs within planetary boundaries.
Wellbeing and job creation
The circular economy has the potential to improve wellbeing through the creation of new high-quality jobs. According to a June 2022 report published by ReLondon (a partnership of the Mayor of London and the London Boroughs): “A crucial element of the just transition to a circular economy is…making the circular economy as inclusive as possible. The circular economy is well positioned to address this due to the wide range of good quality, local jobs available across various sectors, locations and at a range of skills levels…Preventing 10,000 tonnes of waste bound for incineration would lead to the loss of 1 incineration job and the creation of 386 jobs in circular businesses.”
However, at a global level there are also concerns about the impact of the move to a circular economy on wellbeing, especially with respect to low- and middle-income countries where ‘waste pickers’ could lose their livelihoods.
For example, the June 2021 paper ‘A Call for a Socially Restorative Circular Economy: Waste Pickers in the Recycled Plastics Supply Chain’ argues that: “This net job creation is partly due to the circular economy demanding more labour than the linear economy, as manufacturing and repairing goods are more labour intensive than resource extraction…these future jobs require the widespread roll-out of skills training…[but] those losing their jobs and those gaining a new job will not always be the same people, with people working in the extractive industries expected to be disproportionately impacted by job losses…There is likely also to be a new distribution of jobs, both in terms of geography and sector of the economy…As the circular economy approach aims to improve current modes of production, it makes sense to integrate discussions not just on the need for work, but also on the need for that work to be decent…Given how new circular models are being purposefully designed and built, it is essential that sometimes-invisible workers are intentionally engaged in this process to achieve an inclusive circular economy.”
Acknowledging the need to address the social dimension of the circular economy, Zero Waste Scotland announced in 2018 that: “It is time to put wellbeing at the forefront of what we do, including during planning and at the point of investment. Given this, it’s time to stop viewing social benefits as additional or incidental. They should be an integral part of our decision making, to ensure that we are proactively using circular economy interventions to improve lives”.