Abstract
Support for a transition to a ‘Circular Economy’ (CE) has rapidly gained momentum over the last decade, driven to a large extent by the strong commitment of some public authorities – particularly the Chinese government and the European Union (Su et al., 2013; European Commission, 2015; McDowall et al., 2017) – to move away from the linear business model of ‘take-make-waste’ that is no longer sustainable. In the wake of an unprecedented level of attention to the risks related to waste management and plastic pollution, and a consequential rise in related policies around the world, CE regulation is an expanding element of the political and regulatory agenda. Many countries have elaborated comprehensive CE policy packages which include legislative proposals aimed at keeping resources in use as long as possible, extracting maximum value from them, minimizing waste and promoting resource efficiency (Fitch-Roy et al., 2020). CE policies promise to “reshape global industrial systems” by promoting the policy objective of a zero-waste economy and “revert societal and environmental effects to earlier stages in which planetary boundaries were not exceeded” (Borrello et al., 2020).