"The 2014 report of the Eco-Innovation Observatory Eco-Innovation: Enabling the transition to a resource efficient Circular Economy discusses how Eco-Innovation can fuel the transition to a circular economy. This report presents evidence of changes already happening across the EU and highlights some of the key barriers and future challenges toward mainstreaming a circular economic model. It argues that the circular economy concept offers a model of resource flows through the economy that may underpin the vision of a resource-efficient Europe.

Eco-innovation will enable the...

"The 2016 report of the Eco-Innovation Observatory  Policies and Practices for Eco-Innovation Uptake and Circular Economy Transition discusses the role of policy for eco-innovation in the circular economy transition. It looks at the present framework conditions fostered by European policies and how the circular economy concept is being embedded in a current policy context at the EU level and in the Member States. It also discusses the bottom-up and top-down circular economy challenges. 32 good practice examples of circular economy oriented eco-innovations and initiatives from the EU Member...

"The focus of this paper is to review the literature on the [...] macroeconomic implications of the transition to a more circular economy and increased efficiency in the use of material resources. Addressing this issue is complex. Any such transition will involve multiple interactions between different sectors and countries, and will take place parallel with other trends like digitalisation and automation. Ex ante, economy-wide quantatitve models apppear to be best suited to analysing this transition as they capture the major drivers of economic consequences. Furthermore, there is...

"What happens when low-carbon electricity supply technologies are deployed alongside energy efficiency technologies? The International Resource Panel's assessment looks at the impacts and benefits for people and the environment." (http://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/green-technology-choices)

"This report constitutes a summary of presentations and discussions which took place at the workshop ‘Circular approaches to phosphorus: from research to deployment’ held in Berlin on 4 March 2015. The workshop was jointly organised by the European Commission (DG Research & Innovation), the European Sustainable Phosphorus Platform (ESPP) and the P-REX project. The workshop aimed to bring together research and demonstration projects on phosphorus recovery and recycling from across Europe, with industry practitioners and experts, to: enable contact between the different projects in order...

This report seeks to answer five questions:

1. Is Europe’s current resource model effective?
2. Will the technology revolution solve Europe’s resource issues?
3. What would a circular economy in Europe look like?
4. What economic outcomes could a circular model achieve in Europe?
5. If Europe decided to shift towards a circular model, how could policy-makers and business leaders accelerate the transition?

Three of Europe’s most resource-intensive basic needs are discussed; food, mobility and the built environment, all together comprising 60% of...

"As a subdiscipline of industrial ecology, industrial symbiosis is concerned with resource optimization among colocated companies. The industrial symbiosis complex in Kalundborg, Denmark is the seminal example of industrial symbiosis in the industrial ecology literature. In spite of this, there has been no in-depth quantitative analysis enabling more comprehensive understanding of economic and environmental performances connected to this case. In this article some of the central industrial symbiotic exchanges, involving water and steam, in Kalundborg are analyzed, using detailed economic...

This report wants to provide countries and their policy makers who are interested in a transition to the circular economy with a toolkit. To test this toolkit, a case study was performed for Denmark. It focused on opportunities in several sectors; food and beverage, construction and real estate, machinery, plastic packaging and hospitals. Eight important conclusions were drawn:

• The transition to a circular economy can deliver the expected lasting benefits of a more innovative, resilient and productive economy.
• The circular economy provides many opportunities that are...

This paper targets businesses who aspire to transition to a more circular model. The paper advocates for and describes a circular business model (or rather collection of business models) and tran-sition tool called the Value Hill. The value hill provides businesses with detailed information regarding how to best transition to a circular model as well as nuanced descriptions of best practice options. A key component of the Value hill is Network Organization which is an overarching concept/model/tool that encourages increased efficiency and circularity through collaborative partnerships and...

This Dutch study aims to explore how the transition to a circular economy can be measured in the production chain and focuses on asking relevant policy questions for plastic packaging (bottles and other plastic packaging) and electrical devices (washing machines and dryers, and fridges and freezers). However, it does not provide corresponding indicators.

Three types of CE-transitions are identified:
• CE-transitions that place the development of a specific, radical new technology central
• CE-transitions that place socio-economic change central
• CE-transitions...