Scaling circular business models will help the EU achieve its objectives of competitiveness, circularity, resource security and resilience. However, these models have yet to be taken up widely across Europe.
Circular business models can be scaled in three main ways: scaling out (expanding customer numbers); scaling up (influencing structural conditions to support broader adoption); and scaling deep (inducing cultural and behavioural shifts).
Critical thresholds to scaling can be identified: a minimal viable scale; a niche scale; and a transformation point.
There are five key enablers for scaling: regulation and other policies; technological innovation; finance and insurance; social innovation and behavioural change; and supply-chain and ecosystem collaboration.
This report presents the results of a joint research project by the European Investment Bank Group and the European Commission (DG ENV) to assess the circular economy investment gap in the EU.
Annual investments have reached around €120 billion but there is still an investment gap of around €82 billion per year between 2025 and 2040. Gaps are most significant in circular design and end of life infrastructure, and in key sectors such as construction, batteries and vehicles, and textiles.
The report highlights persistent market failures and investment barriers and outlines how EU regulation can help markets to develop and how coordinated EU and EIB financing and advisory action can mobilise investments and accelerate Europe’s circular transition.
This is the fourth edition of the strategic environmental monitoring reports that the Basque Ecodesign Center produces based on the knowledge acquired through its monitoring system.
The report compiles the latest regulatory and market developments driving the transition towards a decarbonised, more circular economy and explores how they are relevant to the value chains in which the Basque Ecodesign Center’s partner companies operate.
It identifies new standards and recognised methodologies that are relevant to those chains and identifies ten key challenges for the circular economy for 2026, such as security of supply and self sufficiency of materials as keys to competitiveness and circularity in the new geopolitical context.
This year’s CGR introduces a new tool: the Value Gap.
This represents the total avoidable value lost through inefficient material use (including energy and food), premature obsolescence and asset deterioration, and partially unpriced externalities. It is an absolute figure that can also be expressed relative to GDP (that is, as euros of avoidable value lost for every euro of value created), indicating how much value is lost for each unit of economic output generated.
Accounting for the Value Gap alongside GDP would provide a more realistic measure of net value creation by revealing how much economic value is structurally lost to linearity and highlighting the scale of opportunity for circular strategies to retain and recover that value.
The Circular Industry Coalition, led by Circul’R and CEA ISEC with the support of the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, brings together nine major industrial companies to address the growing systemic risks facing European industry.
After a year of collective work, the coalition has published a report highlighting the limits of the linear model and positioning a strong circular economy as a strategic lever for competitiveness, resilience and industrial sovereignty.
The report provides a shared assessment of industrial vulnerabilities and an operational roadmap to accelerate circular transformation at scale.
Europe generates considerable post-consumer textile waste (around 25kg per person in 2025), but the system captures and qualifies only a fraction for recycling.
This report, prepared by the Boston Consulting Group, finds that:
A viable European textile-to-textile system requires major investment but is not deemed to be profitable.
Enabling mechanisms coordinating the chain and sharing risk are needed to bridge the economics gap.
Textile-to-textile recycled fibres are a new product category answering a planetary need for circularity, but with structurally higher prcessing costs. Under current conditions, they will not be cost-competitive with existing recycled routes.
Electric vehicles are rapidly transforming the transportation landscape. Circularity solutions, namely recycling and second-life applications, are central to addressing environmental impacts and securing access to valuable materials in electric vehicle batteries (EVBs).
Consolidating lessons learnt from the BATRAW project, this report identifies three key enabling conditions for scaling up circularity applications for EVBs in the EU: (i) effective implementation of the EU policy framework underpinned by the Batteries Regulation; (ii) strengthened financial support for scaling up battery circularity applications; and (iii) further harmonisation of the standardisation landscape impacting EVB circularity.
This study explores how social ties and social impact can be accounted for in circular economy initiatives.
It examines how a local project managing organic waste and unsold goods fosters social ties in a priority urban neighborhood in France, and how these dynamics can be grasped using an alternative qualitative accounting approach.
It identifies key creators of social ties within local initiatives, proposes a social balance sheet highlighting factors that stimulate or undermine these ties and introduces a methodological approach for counting or recounting social impact in circular economy projects.
Businesses are key drivers of regional transformation. Support from public authorities and cooperation with research institutions, local administrations and networks is key to overcoming barriers and unlocking the potential of the circular economy.
This publication shows how companies in rural regions can drive the transition towards a circular economy. Drawing on examples from German and European model regions, it highlights how local enterprises implement circular business models, what opportunities arise for regional value creation and resilience, and which policy and governance frameworks can foster this transformation.
The findings show that the circular economy is not only an ecological necessity but also a strategic pathway towards sustainable and resilient regional development.
This report proposes a bold new idea for EU waste policy: an EU-wide cap-and-trade system to cut residual municipal waste – the waste that remains after prevention, reuse and recycling.
Instead of pushing waste from landfill to incineration, the proposed scheme would put a binding limit on total residuals, creating a strong incentive for waste prevention, reuse, refill and high-quality recycling.
The report also explains why major mineral and combustion wastes should be treated separately, and outlines how a fair, per-capita system could work in practice across the Member States, supported by robust monitoring and verification.
