The Emergence of Circular Economy: A New Framing Around Prolonging Resource Productivity

TLDR

Understanding and facilitating the collective implementation of ideas, including the circular economy, is key to shaping our material future. The authors aim to use Hirsch and Levin’s umbrella concept framework to highlight the circular economy’s catalytic role in waste and resource management and to outline future research directions for industrial ecology, particularly strengthening its social science components. They anchor the CE concept in the broader debate through a narrative approach. The study finds that while CE-related resource strategies are individually familiar, the CE concept reframes them by emphasizing their capacity to prolong resource use and by creating a new cognitive unit and discursive space for waste and resource management.

Abstract

Summary In this article, we use Hirsch and Levin's notion of umbrella concepts as an analytical lens, in order to articulate the valuable catalytic function the circular economy (CE) concept could perform in the waste and resource management debate. We realize this goal by anchoring the CE concept in this broader debate through a narrative approach. This leads to the insight that whereas the various resource strategies grouped under the CE's banner are not new individually, the concept offers a new framing of these strategies by drawing attention to their capacity of prolonging resource use as well as to the relationship between these strategies. As such, the CE offers a new perspective on waste and resource management and provides a new cognitive unit and discursive space for debate. We conclude by discussing research opportunities for the industrial ecology (IE) community relating to the concept's theoretical development and its implementation. Specifically, we pose that reinvigorating and growing the social science aspects of IE is required for both. After all, it is in understanding and facilitating the collective implementation of any idea, also the CE concept, that the potential lies for shaping our material future.