Material circularity and its socio-economic values

Abstract

Circular Economy is an umbrella of definitions. A synthesis might be posed in such way: production and consumption of commodities and services should reduce waste and virgin material use along with refurbishing of in-use goods. The European Union embraced the concept especially in its Mineral Governance, where circularity is followed by responsible sourcing. An economy that intends to increase social and environmental value of its supply chain needs to introduce indicators of social responsibility, material accumulation. Policy evaluation of circularity will use such indicators. In this thesis, a work on the issues of Responsible sourcing and circularity at macro level is made. This work is structured in chapters. The first two chapters will relate the Mineral Governance Issue, while the last three the Circularity and Waste one. We split the discourse of the former in two. In the first chapter we will present the inverse correlation between the objective of safe supply and circularity. While certain materials present potentials for recovery, other have the safe supplies. According to the flow analysis we provided, there are several materials that fail to provide safe access according to these two pillars. In the second chapter, we presented a deeper look at the trade networks. Using data on human rights violations, we differentiated each trade node according to the severity of past human right violations. The novelty introduced to scientific literature represents a commented set of maps regarding all critical raw materials. In the third chapter analyses the methodological limitations of the Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis regarding municipal waste and its separated components. The study implicates that there should be a quantifiable relation between economic activity and waste generation. Therefore, it should be possible to infer some relation with the subcomponents of waste too. However, it appears from the results that such relation is not constant along economic growth and varies across provinces in Italy. Furthermore, the spatial approach we employed, identified spatial interactions between provinces; this is a sigh of performance spill-overs. The fourth chapter uses stock and waste data from 1980 to 2020 to estimate the maximum potential recovery from EEE. The estimate proved that this rate is varying due to the changing in composition of the in-use stock. With the same data, we studied in chapter five, which are the driver of EEE stock accumulation. For the analysis, we employed driver suggested by previous studies such as Economic activity, population characteristics and indicators of average product timespan. As suggested by the European Union communication of 2018 on circularity, we added a theoretical premise to the impact that circular innovation has on stock accumulation. The results underline how that this particular form of innovation foster greater material accumulation.