Breaking the linear trap

Our current linear economic model of "take-make-dispose" is pushing our planet to its limits, with global waste generation projected to increase by 70% to 2050. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, threatening to push global temperatures beyond the critical 1.5°C threshold.

It’s clear that traditional approaches to sustainability are no longer enough to address these challenges. 

That’s why the CirEUlar project is working to transform how we understand and implement circular economy strategies. It recognises that to combat climate change and resource scarcity, we need a fundamental reimagining of our economic systems—one that embraces circularity, dematerialisation and innovative resource management. 

We caught up with Volker Krey, Research Group Leader and Principal Research Scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), a CirEUlar consortium member, to find out more. 

When we started the project, the understanding of how different circular economy (CE) strategies influence Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in the context of transformation pathways was rather limited. 

So an important objective for us was to explicitly integrate a representation of material stocks and flows, as well as CE strategies, into modelling frameworks that assess GHG emissions from energy, land and economic transformation. As, for example, those used in IPCC assessments. Another key contribution of the project is to build the empirical foundations for this representation by better understanding the status quo. 

We also want to understand what consumers and businesses are willing to do in the future and what incentives they would need to do so. For example, what would convince consumers to switch from private car ownership to using shared mobility? 

There are high hopes regarding the contributions of CE strategies to achieving carbon neutrality in Europe towards 2050. We’re aiming to understand the realistic potential for this, taking into account which ‘circular consumption practices’ citizens are willing to adopt. Also, the feedback effects between material cycles and GHG emissions.  

Also, in policy debates, and especially when talking to industry representatives, CE is often reduced to recycling and greening supply chains, possibly also including repair and maintenance strategies. However, strategies to use less materials, for example, by sharing goods or moving to service-based approaches like Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), tend to receive less attention. We want to explore these in more detail in the hope of providing evidence to incentivise people to use services that require less material input.

Many of the solutions we analyse are demand-side focused and the involved technologies are small in scale. So upscaling these solutions quickly should be less challenging compared to large scale technologies—as long as there is political and societal will. 

One key challenge is that it requires firms to partly rethink their business models, which could become a major source of disruption in the transition process.

In CircEUlar, we have three so-called Focus Areas, (i) Mobility, (ii) Buildings and Household Services and (iii) Digitalization, where we conduct in-depth empirical analysis on the status quo and also perform forward-looking modelling analyses. Quantifying the potential to reduce future GHG emissions via CE strategies in these Focus Areas will allow us to highlight impactful policy interventions for decision-makers. 

Digitalization plays a special role since it has a direct impact on material and energy demand. On the one hand, more data storage and analysis contributes to increased GHG emissions. However, potentially and with the right conditions, it can also enable reduced energy use and, therefore, emissions in mobility and buildings. So identifying the conditions where digitization can actually help reduce emissions is one of our key objectives.

Each sector has its own challenges. Often, established actors in the sectors continue doing what they have been doing in the past without the capacity to adopt new circular practices. 

For example, as interviews with architects and construction companies have shown, the adoption of so-called “Building Information Modeling,” which is expected to lead to better maintenance and recycling opportunities in buildings, is slower than hoped for. In part, this is because small-scale businesses, which are very common in the construction sector, don’t have the resources to adopt the technology. 

A transition always ends up with winners and losers. Naturally, consumption-focused business models will perform less well in a transformation towards a circular economy, while opportunities exist for businesses that find innovative ways to provide services with a lower material footprint.

Thinking about lifetime extension of goods, improved maintenance and repair services make sense from a European perspective. This is because they increase the value added in Europe compared to importing new short-lived substitute goods which are less likely produced in Europe and more likely imported from outside the region. So we need to bring that argument, and evidence to back it up, to the conversation. 

We engage with stakeholders in different ways. First, we organize in-person stakeholder workshops where we interact with representatives from policy, businesses and civil society about our so-called Focus Areas. This lets us collect inputs on the needs for decision support and, thus, relevant scenario parameters. 

Second, we organize and participate in virtual and in-person stakeholder outreach events to share our plans and results at different stages. This allows us to gather feedback and take corrective action. 

Third, we have an Advisory Board with representatives from policy, businesses and academia that follows our project continuously and provides valuable feedback to keep the research on track so it’s useful for decision making. 

It’s difficult to quantitatively measure success in terms of influencing policy decisions. Ultimately, it can be best covered by a narrative that we will only see emerging in the later part of the project and after it ends. In other words, we hope to learn from stakeholders that we are engaging with throughout the course of the project whether and if so, how, the research was able to help them in making decisions.

Project success is also assessed based on key performance indicators like number of publications, citations of presentations and so on, which we are, of course, conscious about. I think we do reasonably well in terms of such indicators but their meaning should not be overinterpreted.  

We’ve made significant progress on the empirical and conceptual side. For example, we’ve published a spatially resolved dataset of more than 200 million buildings in Europe that lays important foundations for forward-looking scenario analysis. 

We’ve also led important activities to advance the understanding of the status quo of industry sector modeling and develop a consensus in the research community about important circularity challenges in the transition to a low-carbon economy.  

It’s early days but we’re optimistic about the contribution we can make to driving change towards a circular economy.  

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