Original title: Circular economy indicators: What do they measure?
The circular economyAn approach to using resources that aims to keep them in use rather than treating them as waste. aims to keep resources in use, but people use the term in different ways. The researchers sort indicators by what they try to preserve, such as products or materials, and by what effects they measure, such as environmental or social ones. They apply this framework to small-scale indicators from research and European Union indicators. Most focus on preserving materials, often through recycling. None assess keeping a product’s function through approaches such as sharing.
Imagine packing for a trip and trying to waste less. You might reuse containers, share some items, or choose things that serve several purposes, but a tally of how much material you packed would miss those choices. In this paper, the tally stands for an indicator, and the different ways of packing stand for the circular-economy strategies it should measure.
Governments and businesses use indicators to judge whether their plans are making resource use more circular. If the measures mostly count materials, strategies such as sharing products or making one product serve several purposes may be missed. The paper argues that assessing circularity takes a set of indicators, not just one.
The framework is illustrated using selected quantitative indicators from research at a small scale and indicators from the European Union’s monitoring framework. The abstract does not establish how the framework performs beyond this illustration or how the indicators work in practice. It finds no available indicator for preserving functions instead of products, but does not say whether that gap has since changed.
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Circular economy indicators: What do they measure? — Gustavo Moraga, Sophie Huysveld, Fabrice Mathieux et al. — Resources Conservation and Recycling — doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2019.03.045
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.