Kick-off session of review to establish ‘stylized facts’ for the circular economy (14:00 UTC)
Session Organiser: Stefan Pauliuk
Institution: University of Freiburg, Germany
Location/Local Time: Germany (3-4pm)
Abstract:
The circular economy (CE) has risen to the top of global policy agendas, with high expectations that it is the new win-win-win sustainability strategy. Over the last decades, the global IE community and many other scholars have built the scientific basis of the CE, by compiling a tremendously large body of research on material stocks and flows, environmental assessments of resource efficiency strategies, business models for ‘closing the loop’, and many more topics broadly related to the CE.
It’s time to take stock and summarize this research! Inspired by the 2023 White Paper (van Ewijk et al. (2023), which highlights a number of core insights for the sustainable development of industrial production and consumption, a team from the ISIE-CE and ISIE-SEM sections set out to review the CE literature and synthesize the established body of knowledge into Stylized Facts about the CE. Stylized facts [2] about the CE are general aggregated statements about properties, potentials, and constraints of the CE that everyone dealing with the CE should know and adhere to.
Session Details:
The plan is to compile a document (current goal is to turn it into a JIE Forum piece) that lists the facts that we’ll be able to synthesize (grouped into, e.g., ‘first principles’, ‘raw materials’, ‘economic value’, ‘energy and GHG’, …). For each fact, a supplementary document will contain 2-4 pages of review that lists and discusses the evidence, counter-evidence, and knowledge gaps, and justifies the evidence-agreement ranking.
This session will kick-off the review work. We'll discuss the scope of the work and assign first responsibilities.
The further timeline is as follows:
+++ Kick-off meeting during the 2024 Industrial Ecology Day on November 21: Short-list candidates for CE stylized facts and discuss how to best group them
+++ Early December ’24: Divide review tasks to contributors according to preliminary list of CE facts/topics (need your commitment at this stage)
+++ Jan-Feb ’25: review ongoing
+++ March ’25: synthesis meetings
+++ April-June ’25: additional iterations and review
+++ July ’25: Submission to JIE and archiving on preprint server.
For more details, see https://is4ie.org/announcements/1990
Please register in advance at: https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/u50vf-GorTItGNQhhBLYdCguXcxfEIywtjhg
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