Toward an integrated model of the circular economy: Dynamic waste input–output

Abstract

Since its development at the end of the previous century, the waste input–output (WIO) model has been extended to wide areas of industrial ecology including material flow analysis (MFA), life-cycle costing (LCC), regional analysis, and linear programming (LP)-based technology selection. To our knowledge, the dynamics of waste generation and recycling is an area of possible conceptual extension that remains least explored. Building upon our recent work on dynamic MFA, in this work, we develop a dynamic WIO (dWIO) model that fully considers the issue of quality in recycling that involves mixing, dissipation, and contamination.