THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY - A PATHWAY TO SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY - A PATHWAY TO SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

Summary/Abstract: The circular economy is an attractive, smart and innovative concept, promising the efficient use and reuse of resources and a strong business case. It is a sustainable development strategy that is being proposed to tackle the problems of environmental degradation and weaken the dependence of economy on natural resources and environment. Through embedding the 3R principles of materials use Reduce, Reuse and Recycling into production and consumption process, the Circular Economy aims at greater resource productivity, higher energy savings and lower greenhouse gasses emission. Several different approaches that encourage the transition to a circular economy exist. Among them, the approaches to closing material loops and use the product as a service system in a circular economy are developing most intensively and till now many innovative business systems and models proved effective in delivering resource efficiencies, both, within the manufacturing process and at the end of product life. The transformation is a complete systematic change comprising of innovation in technological and organizational terms too. By helping to decouple economic growth from resource use the transformation to circular economy offers a prospect of sustainable growth that will last. The majority of reported initiatives on the circular economy is targeted at waste and secondary raw materials, whereas only few countries have explicitly commented that Circular Economy requires going beyond increasing recycling rates and a higher use of the secondary raw materials by utilization of different innovative approaches that have to be combined and implemented across the whole supply chain.

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