The Economy That Throws Nothing Away: How Cities Are Reinventing Waste
At a demolition site in central Beijing, concrete doesn’t go to landfill. It’s crushed, screened, reborn as aggregate for a new expressway. In Rotterdam, an office building is disassembled like LEGO — columns, beams, windows, all logged in a digital “materials passport,” awaiting a second life in another project. These examples illustrate principles of the circular economy at work. Meanwhile, a fast-growing Arab city dumps 60% of its construction waste in the desert and imports cement from abroad. The difference isn’t technology. It’s who decided that “the end” isn’t the end.
From 114 Definitions to 221: How the Concept Grew to Encompass the Planet
A decade ago, Kirchherr and colleagues analyzed 114 definitions of the circular economy. Most focused on “reduce, reuse, recycle” — end-of-life activities. Only 40% viewed the system as a whole, and just 12% explicitly linked the concept to sustainable development. Economic prosperity appeared in 46% of definitions, environmental quality in 37%, social equity in a mere 18%. Five years later, a replication study on 221 new definitions found a shifted landscape. Mentions of sustainable development tripled (to 27-31%), and calls for fundamental systemic change grew substantially. The required coalition of actors widened — not just producers and consumers but policymakers and academia. Supply chain reconfiguration and technological innovation moved to center stage. The updated meta-definition reads: “The circular economy is a regenerative economic system which necessitates a paradigm shift to replace the ‘end-of-life’ concept with reducing, alternatively reusing, recycling, and recovering materials throughout the supply chain, with the aim to promote value retention and sustainable development, creating environmental quality, economic development, and social equity, to the benefit of current and future generations.” The evolution reflects a maturing field moving from narrow waste management framings toward holistic, systems-oriented understandings.
Partial Theories, Not One Grand Theory: Building Science from the Ground Up
Despite the concept’s popularity, Mignacca and colleagues critique that most circular economy research is descriptive rather than explanatory — “gap-spotting” instead of theory-building. Their proposed solution: partial CE theories for specific practices — reuse, repair, remanufacture, recycle — that can later merge into an integrative theory. As illustration, they develop propositions toward a “theory of reuse”: a high degree of product modularity, standardization, and innovation facilitates effective reuse practices. Industries characterized by modular design (electronics with standardized interfaces) have greater reuse potential than those without. This practical-oriented perspective helps policymakers identify preconditions for implementing specific circular practices and supports organizations in making evidence-based circular choices. The call for stronger theoretical engagement signals field maturation: moving from descriptive accounts of circular practices toward systematic explanations of why and under what conditions certain circular practices succeed.
Metaphors That Shape What We See and What We Miss: Machine, Journey, Garden
How we think about the circular economy is shaped by conceptual metaphors we don’t notice. Fromberg and colleagues’ analysis of the 10 most-cited CE papers found the “machine” metaphor dominant — “resource inputs and outputs,” “driving force,” “closed loop” — appearing in 8 of 10 papers. Competitive metaphors followed (“market leadership,” “popularize,” “resistance”), then the “journey” metaphor (“pathway,” “step-by-step,” “barriers”), with ecological metaphors (“roots,” “cross-fertilization,” “growing”) a distant fourth. The problem: the machine metaphor, rooted in Newtonian mechanics, promotes reductionist thinking and treats the economy as separable from society — a blind spot obscuring the social dimensions of circular transitions. The journey metaphor can serve to “avoid making specific and substantive commitments” and justify “small actions without accompanying big action.” Competitive metaphors leave “little room for pre-competitive collaboration” and overlook the interdependent, symbiotic relationships essential to circular systems. The authors advocate for ecological metaphors — the garden, the ecosystem — which embrace complexity, nonlinearity, collaboration, and regeneration, features more aligned with CE’s transformative ambitions.
China and Europe: Two Pioneers, Two Divergent Paths
Circular economy policy implementation has followed distinct trajectories in two influential regions. McDowall and colleagues’ comparative analysis reveals fundamental differences in problem framing, policy scope, and implementation strategies. In China, CE is framed as a broad response to severe environmental degradation from rapid industrialization. The concept links to pollution control, “harmonious development,” and “ecological civilization” — China’s long-term vision for sustainable development. Chinese CE policy operates across multiple spatial scales (micro, meso, macro), with a distinctive system of designated pilot zones, industrial parks, and demonstration cities assessed against key performance targets and receiving central government funding. In contrast, Europe’s conception has a narrower environmental scope, focusing chiefly on waste, resources, and business competitiveness opportunities. European policies emphasize eco-design, product durability labeling, and innovative business models like product-service systems. Europe’s approach is largely silent on spatial scale and place, unlike China’s explicit integration of CE into land-use planning. These differences reflect divergent industrial structures — China’s larger manufacturing sector prioritizing cleaner production, Europe’s consumption-driven economy focusing on waste management and product design.
Lessons from China: Multi-Level Governance Is Not Just a Slogan
A comprehensive review by Luo and Leipold of 104 scholarly works on Chinese CE policy development paints a more nuanced picture than the conventional narrative of purely top-down governance. Centralized governance provided crucial drivers — through Five-Year Plans, the Circular Economy Promotion Law (2009), and ideological goals like ecological modernization. But the upscaling process was also influenced by international scholarship and policy experiences from Germany, Japan, and Sweden, plus multi-level dynamics involving provincial and local actors. The review identifies four key implementation barriers that hindered macro-level CE upscaling: (1) fragmented legal and regulatory systems with inadequate incentives for private stakeholders; (2) significant regional differences and uneven development; (3) poor coordination between implementing agencies and between central and local governments; (4) spatial limitations restricting effective industrial symbiosis. Three generalizable lessons emerge: the need to carefully integrate centralized and multi-level governance; the importance of anticipating how CE goals interact and co-evolve with existing policy priorities at different scales; and the recognition that macro-scale CE development remains conceptually and practically underdeveloped, requiring more stakeholder coordination and silo-breaking.
Asia-Pacific: The Hanoi Declaration and Vast Diversity
A broader survey by Mohan and colleagues maps the varied adoption of 3R (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) and circular economy frameworks across Asia and the Pacific against the backdrop of the Hanoi 3R Declaration (2013-2023). East Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, China) — along with Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand — have clear strategic roadmaps for CE. Many South Asian and Pacific Island nations remain in early implementation stages. Common challenges include institutional fragmentation, technological gaps (particularly in automated sorting and data collection), financial constraints, and inadequate policies for emerging waste streams like e-waste and plastics. Documented best practices serve as models: Japan’s Circular Economy Vision 2020 and the Japan Partnership for Circular Economy (J4CE); Singapore’s Zero Waste Masterplan targeting food, e-waste, and plastics; Thailand’s Bio-Circular-Green (BCG) economic model; and Australia’s National Waste Policy Action Plan backed by significant government investment. These examples demonstrate that successful circular transitions require not only national policies but also stakeholder engagement, institutional frameworks with clear delegation of authorities, and cross-border collaboration.
The Consumer: The Forgotten Hero of the Closed Loop
A critical but historically under-researched element of CE is the consumer. Vidal-Ayuso and colleagues’ systematic literature review of 232 articles reveals that consumer decision-making — particularly the post-purchase phase involving use, repair, recycling, and upcycling — remains poorly understood despite its critical importance for closing material loops. The review identifies six main research clusters linking consumers and CE: (1) CE business models and the general role of consumers; (2) packaging and recycled plastics (distribution and recycling); (3) purchase intention and sustainable consumption; (4) product lifetime extension and reparability (use phase); (5) e-waste (disposal); and (6) upcycling. Using the Antecedents-Decisions-Outcomes (ADO) framework, the study maps factors influencing consumer decisions. Key positive antecedents include attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, environmental awareness, and green self-identity — grounded in the Theory of Planned Behavior and perceived self-identity theory. Negative influences center on perceived risk: concerns about product quality, functionality, contamination, financial risk, and obsolescence. The critical gap: post-purchase phase research is substantially absent. In linear consumption models, the consumer’s role effectively ends at purchase. In a CE, consumers must engage in product care, repair, proper disposal, and upcycling — actions essential to keep resources circulating. The authors call for new research on consumer satisfaction, loyalty, and behavior during this extended post-purchase phase, and on how consumer education and information provision can facilitate more circular consumption patterns.
Synthesis and Forward Look: Definitions Consolidate, Theories Grow, Metaphors Shape, Context Decides
The interdisciplinary exploration reveals several cross-cutting insights. Definitional consolidation is occurring, but tensions remain — between economic growth-oriented framings (dominant in Europe and practitioner discourse) and more transformational visions questioning whether CE can truly reconcile environmental sustainability with continued economic expansion. Theoretical foundations are being built but require further development — moving beyond descriptive case studies toward systematic theory-building through “partial CE theories” with predictive power. Metaphorical framings shape what is seen and what is obscured — the dominance of mechanistic and competitive metaphors may inadvertently reinforce the very thought patterns the concept seeks to overcome, while ecological and systemic metaphors remain underutilized. Policy implementation is context-dependent and requires multi-level coordination — the contrasting experiences of China, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific prove that CE policies must adapt to local industrial structures, governance systems, and socio-cultural contexts. No single blueprint exists for circular transition. Consumers are essential but understudied actors — despite rhetorical recognition that CE requires a broad coalition, empirical understanding of consumer behavior in circular systems, particularly the crucial post-purchase phase, remains insufficient.
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
The reviewed research reveals that the circular economy is not a single technical model but a contested conceptual field — 221 definitions in five years, each carrying a different political wager. The shift from “waste management” to “regenerative economic system” wasn’t incremental but discontinuous: social equity, absent from 82% of early definitions, became central in a third of later ones. This isn’t pure academic evolution — it reflects battles over who bears the costs and who captures the gains of closing the loop. Who pays for the closed loop? Who profits? European definitions center “business competitiveness” — the circular economy as market opportunity. Chinese definitions center “ecological civilization” — the circular economy as systemic survival tool. The two definitions aren’t describing the same thing.
The counterintuitive finding: the metaphors we use don’t just describe reality, they make it. The dominance of the “machine” metaphor (inputs, outputs, closed loop) in 80% of the most-cited papers turned the circular economy into an engineering problem — optimize flows, minimize leakage. But the city is not a machine. The neighborhood that reuses bricks from its demolished buildings isn’t optimizing a flow; it’s preserving spatial memory, craft skills, social fabric. The “garden” or “ecosystem” metaphor that Fromberg and colleagues advocate would make us ask: what grows here? Who tends it? What symbiotic relations do we need? The metaphorical shift isn’t linguistic decoration — it changes what counts as a “solution.”
The systemic implications show sharply in the Chinese-European comparison. China built a spatial implementation mechanism: pilot cities, industrial parks, performance indicators, central funding. Europe built a product regulatory mechanism: eco-design, durability labels, extended producer responsibility. China addresses “where” and “how much” — spatial scale, geographic concentration. Europe addresses “what” and “how” — material composition, product life cycle. Circular economy in construction needs both: a European “materials passport” for every beam and column, and a Chinese “pilot zone” for every neighborhood being rebuilt. But the deeper Chinese lesson: the four barriers — legal fragmentation, regional disparity, coordination failure, spatial constraints — are the same barriers any Arab city faces trying to apply circular economy in construction. The answer isn’t importing a model, but building the institutional coordination capacity that breaks silos.
The lingering question: the consumer. The systematic review of 232 studies finds the post-purchase phase — where the consumer becomes material guardian, repairer, disassembler, upcycler — is the real “black box” of the circular economy. Circular business models assume a cooperative consumer, but evidence says: consumers fear quality, contamination, cost, obsolescence. Green self-identity drives trial, but satisfaction and persistence depend on actual use experience. A truly circular city isn’t one that recycles 90% of its waste — it’s a city where residents ask: “Where does this go? How do I fix it? Who benefits?” and know the answer. Until we build that awareness, every “closed loop” on a planning diagram is just an arrow drawn on paper, not material circulating in reality.
References:
1. Kirchherr, Julian, Reike, Daniel, Hekkert, Marko. “Conceptualizing the circular economy: An analysis of 114 definitions.” Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2017.
2. Kirchherr, Julian, et al. “Conceptualizing the Circular Economy (Revisited): An Analysis of 221 Definitions.” Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2023.
3. Mignacca, Benedetta, et al. “Building circular economy theories: A practical‐oriented perspective and a way forward.” Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2025.
4. Fromberg, Ellen H.E., Bakker, Conny A., Peck, David. “Conceptualising a Circular Economy — an Enquiry into Circular Economy Conceptual Metaphors.” Circular Economy and Sustainability, 2023.
5. McDowall, William, et al. “Circular Economy Policies in China and Europe.” Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2017.
6. Luo, An, Leipold, Sina. “Chinese lessons on upscaling environmental policy concepts? A review of policy-oriented circular economy research.” Journal of Cleaner Production, 2022.
7. Mohan, Jaya, Mohanty, C.R.C., Cross, J.S., Khajuria, Anjali. “Mapping 3R and Circular Economy Policy Implementation in Asia and the Pacific.” Circular Economy and Sustainability, 2023.
8. Vidal-Ayuso, Francisco, Akhmedova, Aida, Jaca, Carlos. “The circular economy and consumer behaviour: Literature review and research directions.” Journal of Cleaner Production, 2023.
