CIRCULAR ECONOMY REALITIES
Since the passage of the European Union’s (EU) Circular Economy Action Plan in 2015, the concept of a circular economy (CE) has taken hold in an extraordinary way as a policy for resource management (with some social expectations) and in a truly phenomenal way as an object for academic research. Since 2018, the Cresting project (Circular Economy: Sustainability Implications and Guiding Progress) has been researching the progress of the CE in a range of settings, as well as looking at the wider effects and developing strategies and practices for implementation thereof. The uptake of the field rather underscores the need to devote some critical energy to considering the implications of what is happening, or what it is hoped may be happening – a challenge that others have also taken up during this time. The same time period has also seen a global pandemic, wars and an extraordinary uptick in the number of people taking the search for sustainability into their own hands rather than waiting for it to come to them. Climate change has reached a point of influencing weather patterns on a scale difficult to miss, although ironically this has not consolidated public opinion in favour of action. Into this maelstrom we offer the present volume as a critical appraisal of the progress and potential of a concept that offers sustainability benefits (e.g. reductions in carbon emissions, resource security, economic competitiveness, job creation). Members of the project team have been productive with their contributions to academic publications and policy recommendations. The present volume draws on our body of interrelated work to identify and explore a bigger and more holistic picture of the reality of developing a CE, and the implications thereof, than can be accomplished through individual research studies that by necessity focus solely on a specific aspect.
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