![]() With no good news to offer on the front of improving the global circularity rate, the Circle Economy team then came up with a few practical solutions: 21 of them, to be precise. By drastically reducing the exploitation of virgin raw materials, the circular economy, as stated in the report, could then cut carbon emissions by as much as 39%, putting the world back on track to contain temperatures at +1.5☌. Despite the fact that the topic is almost always absent from climate meetings, it is precisely the processes of extraction, processing, consumption and disposal of materials that emit most greenhouse gases: 70%. The historical moment, however, seems favorable: “Hot on the heels of COP26, both business and public interest in climate action is high”, the authors write in the introduction, and the tools of the circular economy may prove fundamental in the fight against global warming. However, there is still a long way to go before it becomes the norm, as the Circularity Gap Report points out. In the meantime, the circular economy has begun to appear on the global scene, at first only as an evocative vision, then as a concrete possibility to change the system, and today it has become an almost mainstream concept. Unfortunately, this warning has remained largely unheeded, given that since then, annual resource consumption has quadrupled, rising from 28 billion tons in 1972 to over 100 billion tons today. The year 2022 marks an important anniversary: exactly 50 years ago, Club of Rome published the first “Report on the Limits to Growth”, issuing a clear warning about the risk of collapse of an economy and a society based on infinite growth. The 50th anniversary of The Limits to Growth: where are we now? Today, only 8.6% of the world economy is circular. The document, which captures the development of the circular economy in the world, does not bring good news: still more than 90% of the resources extracted and consumed do not return to the production cycles, but become waste. The sum was calculated by the think-tank Circle Economy that, like it does every January since 2018, presented the new Circularity Gap Report. That's the amount of resources consumed globally over the past six years, between COP21 in Paris in 2015 and COP26 in Glasgow.
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