Towards Sustainable Development through the Circular Economy—A Review and Critical Assessment on Current Circularity Metrics

The circular economy (CE) is an optimal pathway to sustainable development and companies, governments and academics have formulated various proposals to measure circularity.  Ideally, circularity metrics indicate how well circularity is applied to the whole life cycle of products and services in terms of society, the environment and economy.  Myriad frameworks and indices are available for measuring resource efficiency and sustainability performance.  However, most of them are criticized for ignoring the characteristics of the circular loops, not representing the systemic and multidisciplinary nature of circularity, and failing to consider its multidimensional social, environmental and economic sustainability impacts and benefits.