After all, what is meant by Circular Economy?

Terminology related to sustainable development appears more and more in articles, books, policies, and even in the media, but a wide variety of definitions can lead to confusion about its use. Growth in impact and scale can make definition difficult and hard to find the right definition, also because people naturally use different focuses and languages when thinking of similar examples and ideas. The uncertainty of new concepts, especially complex concepts, can give rise to a wrong perception, although the integration of economic, environmental and social dimensions in activities is always understood as a necessary condition for sustainability. The Circular Economy (CE) even manages to link the economic system to environmental challenges and society's expectations. With it sustainable development relies on terminology applicable to real-world problems.

How to arrive at a definition of CE – that helps to implement CE to its restorative objective, since it is a complex and multi-level model implying economic and physical flows that must be guided by principles such as reduce, reuse and recycle, and key drivers to close the loops – a closed loop system?

Linguistically, it is an antonym of the Linear Economy, but and descriptively? It is what model? What system? What policy(ies)?

This article was originally published on Barómetro Social.