Circular Economy: Enabling the Transition Towards Sustainable Consumption and Production

Abstract

The circular economy concept describes an industrial economy with a zero-waste approach. Circular economy is a model for sustainable economic growth, where generation of waste and pollution is minimized by maintaining the value of products and furthermore materials longer and keeping them in circulation. It has a foundation in multiple sustainability-oriented practices, including the reduce, reuse, and recycle principles of waste management hierarchy, the one industry’s waste is another’s resource approach, the regenerative principles of cradle-to-cradle design, and the sustainable business model approach of product-service systems. Circular economy includes both biological materials and technical materials. Biological materials are beneficial for a circular economy as their natural circulations can be harnessed for value creation; and technical materials can be reused multiple times without producing waste and...