Circular Economy: metrics for business and best practices

Circular Economy has been gaining momentum in recent years. The concept of Circular Economy evolved from a resource efficiency and closing material loops perspective to a wider purpose including the three dimensions of sustainability: economic, social and environmental. The Circular Economy paradigm is considered a possible path to achieve a sustainable development by decoupling economic growth from material consumptions and environmental impacts. The development of the CE concept has opened the way to new Circular Business Models (CBMs); nevertheless, only few CMSs are characterized by practical applications in the market. Among these, the Product-as-Service system (PSS) can represent a viable way for companies and customers to implement a circular scheme. In this work, two particular best practices have been presented, one regarding the household appliances and the other concerning the lighting system. A large variety of assessment tools to measure circularity at different spatial levels of intervention have been developed. As a consequence, it has been observed a lack of a structured and standardized assessment method. The aim of this work is to provide an analysis of the current references on the CE assessment and indicators that can be found in literature; the method adopted consisted in analysing the most reasonably relevant studies concerning this topic and providing the aforementioned business best practices that regard measuring circularity.