The environmental and climate benefits of a circular economy

This briefing estimates the potential environmental and climate benefits of 17 circular economy interventions, modelled across provisioning systems for food, housing, mobility and consumer goods. It indicates that more circularity would substantially contribute to the EU’s climate and environmental ambitions.

Key messages

• A combination of just 17 circular economy interventions can potentially reduce the EU’s impact on climate by 22% or almost 1 billion tonnes of CO2e, on biodiversity by 19% and on air pollution by 25%.
• An increase in the EU’s security of supply is another potential benefit. For example, the EU’s reliance on extraction of aluminium, nickel, and platinum group metals ores in other world regions would be reduced by around 20%, and for copper by around 12%.
• Circular economy interventions reduce demand for natural resources, which could lead to the development of innovative circular business models by shifting opportunities for adding economic value from the resource extraction phase to the use phase of products, especially in the buildings, mobility and food systems.
• Reducing resource use has benefits within the EU but also elsewhere in the world, as the EU imports large amounts of resources and products. Our modelling results indicate that 2/3 of the benefits for climate change and pollution would occur within the EU, while 1/3 would occur elsewhere. For biodiversity loss this split is more or less even.
• The ambition and speed with which circular economy interventions are implemented make a big difference to the benefits they can deliver. Applying a high ambition level for the 17 modelled interventions achieves more than 80% higher environmental and climate benefits than a medium ambition level.