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.