The World Circular Economy Forum (WCEF) concluded in Gandhinagar last week. Across the week-long event, circular economy (CE) was the central theme in nearly every session, but every time it was mentioned, it meant something different. In one panellists head it was strictly a recycling and recovery target. In another speakers mind, as a redesign of business models: Leasing, product-as-a-service, take-back schemes. A panel moderator's version of circular economy was a macroeconomic decoupling strategy.
This raised a series of questions in my head as a curious attendee of the WCEF: Where did the term actually come from, how has it evolved, and what, if anything, is agreed upon? And here’s what I found:
The phrase “circular economy” is traced to Pearce and Turner (1990), who used it narrowly to describe the closed feedback loops between natural resource stocks and the environment’s capacity to absorb waste. It wasn't used the way we understand it today. The idea itself had already taken shape long before the term existed.
Blomsma and Brennan (2017) described circular economy as an "umbrella concept". This label came later, after the ideas behind it had already existed under other names for decades, such as the closed-loop economy, the cyclic economy, and the closed spaceship economy.
The concept’s development is traced across three broad phases.
A shift is visible across these phases. Circular economy’s earliest roots were preoccupied with toxicity, scarcity, pollution containment, finite resources, and the fear of running out.
Over time, this primitive framing was broadened considerably, from containing harm to actively redesigning production and consumption. Moving from single strategies (etc. recycling, incineration) to systemic, regenerative models; and from a concern of environmentalists and engineers to one now claimed jointly by consumers, producers, policymakers, and academia.
What began as a defensive response to pollution, and depletion is now framed, in current literature, as an offensive economic strategy: value creation, growth, and competitiveness, not merely harm reduction.
Two studies have attempted to map this fragmentation empirically. In Kirchherr, Reike and Hekkert (2017), 114 definitions of circular economy were coded across academic and practitioner literature. In Kirchherr, Yang, Schulze-Spüntrup, Heerink and Hartley (2023), a further 221 academic definitions were coded on an expanded framework. Together, 335 definitions have been systematically analysed the closest available empirical account of what “circular economy” means.
Across both studies, definitions were coded on three clusters:
Core principles: How circularity is achieved?
Aims: Why it is pursued?
Enablers: Who is expected to drive it?
A waste hierarchy: Ranking the R’s, is present in only a minority of definitions in both studies. Without it, circularity can be claimed through recycling or even worse, incineration alone. There is a high risk of the concept of circular economy being subverted due to this gap.
Social equity and future generations remain the weakest-coded aims in both datasets, this means that despite the growing interest in circular economy, various stakeholders across the length and breadth of decision making- de-prioritize social equity and future generations. However there is a growing trend observed in this areas between 2017 and 2023.
Business models are widely agreed to be central to circular economy in principle, yet are explicitly mentioned in only a minority of definitions (11 per cent in 2017, and 21-27 per cent in 2023). In practice, this means a company can be counted as "circular" simply for recycling its packaging, even if its underlying business model is selling more units, faster, with built-in obsolescence, operating a linear system garbed under a circular label. A phone manufacturer that runs a takeback and recycling programme, for instance, can claim circularity without ever shifting toward repairable design, longer warranties, or a leasing model that would actually reduce how many phones get made in the first place.
Reduce is consistently de-emphasised relative to reuse, recycle, and recover particularly in practitioner definitions. This is most likely because reduction implies curbing consumption, which is an uncomfortable message for business.
Consolidation and fragmentation of circular economy as a concept are occurring simultaneously. Agreement on reuse and recycle as core ideas is growing, even as industry- and country-specific versions of circular economy keep multiplying. Some examples are as follows:
Country-specific examples:
China its 2008 Circular Economy Promotion Law is built specifically around the 3R framework (reduce, reuse, recycle), formalized as national policy.
European Union the EU's Circular Economy Action Plan/Package frames CE around resource efficiency targets, closing loops within EU supply chains, and has been criticized for focusing mainly on recycling rather than deeper redesign.
Industry-specific examples:
There is a growing trend of narrower, sector-bound definitions from the different industries
Apparel/textiles: CE framed around job shifts from production to reuse/recycling activities within apparel value chains.
Automotive: CE definitions built around vehicle end-of-life recovery, remanufacturing of parts, and "heavy vehicles" supply chains.
Construction: CE framed around building materials, deconstruction, and reuse of components rather than product-level recycling.
Eco-industrial parks: an industry cluster model (multiple companies co-located to exchange waste/byproducts as each other's inputs) this was a major CE definition category in the 2017 paper, though the 2023 paper found it had lost relevance by comparison to broader macro-level framings.
Packaging/FMCG several individual definitions in the 2023 sample frame CE narrowly around a single product category rather than the whole economy. For instance, ocean plastic debris re-entering the production loop through recycled content in packaging.
An umbrella concept under validity challenge, as per established framework mentioned by Blomsma and Brennan, tends toward one of three outcomes:
Coherence, where the theoretical issues are resolved and definitions converge;
Collapse, where the concept fails under its own contradictions;
Permanent contention, where the field agrees to disagree and the label persists as a useful but fuzzy banner.
Current evidence points to a mix of the first and third outcome, real convergence on certain core principles, alongside a widening spread of context-specific variants that shows no sign of narrowing. Both studies suggest that a single, final definition may be less important than a firmer waste hierarchy, deeper integration of business models, and stronger attention to social equity, and future generations the dimensions most consistently found missing across analysed 335 definitions of circular economy.