Iacovidou, E orcid.org/0000-0001-6841-0995, Velis, CA orcid.org/0000-0002-1906-726X, Purnell, P et al. (5 more authors) (2017) Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review. Journal of Cleaner Production, 166. pp. 910-938. ISSN 0959-6526
Abstract
Established assessment methods focusing on resource recovery from waste within a circular economy context consider few or even a single domain/s of value, i.e. environmental, economic, social and technical domains. This partial approach often delivers misleading messages for policy and decision-makers. It fails to accurately represent systems complexity, and obscures impacts, trade-offs and problem shifting that resource recovery processes or systems intended to promote circular economy may cause. Here, we challenge such partial approaches by critically reviewing the existing suite of environmental, economic, social and technical metrics that have been regularly observed and used in waste management and resource recovery systems' assessment studies, upstream and downstream of the point where waste is generated. We assess the potential of those metrics to evaluate ‘complex value’ of materials, components and products, i.e., the holistic sum of their environmental, economic, social and technical benefits and impacts across the system. Findings suggest that the way resource recovery systems are assessed and evaluated require simplicity, yet must retain a suitable minimum level of detail across all domains of value, which is pivotal for enabling sound decision-making processes. Criteria for defining a suitable set of metrics for assessing resource recovery from waste require them to be simple, transparent and easy to measure, and be both system- and stakeholder-specific. Future developments must focus on providing a framework for the selection of metrics that accurately describe (or at least reliably proxy for) benefits and impacts across all domains of value, enabling effective and transparent analysis of resource recovery form waste in circular economy systems.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | metrics; circular economy; material flow analysis; resource recovery; sustainability assessment; solid waste management; sustainability indicators; multi-dimensional value |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Economics Division (LUBS) (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Civil Engineering (Leeds) > Institute for Resilient Infrastructure (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NERC NE/L014149/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 18 Jul 2017 10:01 |
Last Modified: | 22 Aug 2017 19:47 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.07.100 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:119172 |