Closed-loop systems to circular economy: A pathway to environmental sustainability?

The global society faces an existential threat if it fails to meet current and future material needs of its populations, while staying within the carrying capacity of our planet. An approach that has been put forwards to address this complex challenge is to aim to close our society's material flows through introduction of a Circular Economy (CE). This paper provides an extensive literature review to understand the evolution of material circularity concepts and strategies, and their potential for increasing material efficiency and reduce environmental impacts towards meeting the material needs of our societies in an environmentally sustainable manner. Based on the review it can be concluded that CE may have a strong potential to help address the challenge. However, this requires broadening the focus of CE from technical and economical to political and socio-cultural dimensions, adopting a whole-systems approach, aiming to redesign economic and social relations to not just reduce the impact humanity has on the environment but actually achieve a balance in human-nature relations with a planetary boundary thinking. Pursuing purely technical and economic avenues to implement CE for increasing material circulation and sustainable growth on the foundation of our current linear economic system, will not achieve its full potential. It will not be sustainable but continue to produce the challenges that we currently have.