Researchers and societal partners develop new insights, technologies, and policies to help society become circular.
Towards a Circular Economy and Society is a platform for scientists of Utrecht University and stakeholders to jointly contribute to the transition to a sustainable circular society.
Environmental degradation, climate change, and scarcity of resources are key challenges for modern society. From the stone age to modern society, materials provide essential services to mankind. Indeed, materials touch every aspect and moment of our lives. As a result of global population growth and increased prosperity there is an increasing demand for raw materials.
Today, we extract, produce, process and dispose more material than ever before, leading to exponential growth. This leads to increased environmental pressures and is clearly unsustainable. Dealing with this explosive demand for materials is one of the main challenges we face in the 21st century. This is also recognised by the Dutch government and the European Commission in their circular economy policies. These challenges makes it necessary to fundamentally change our ways of production and consumption. In Dutch and European policy the transition to a circular economy (in a broad sense) is seen as essential for facing these challenges and realising sustainable use of resources.
Research Approach
This community has the ambition to develop new science and technology solutions for a circular economy and to lay the foundation for a better system understanding of the circular society of the future through the creation of a vibrant interdisciplinary research community, focussing on three lines of research:
Consumer behaviour and stakeholder adaptation of circular solutionsThis research line includes a variety of research topics, starting with a better understanding of consumption as phenomenon from a systems perspective, and the barriers and drivers to consumers to change to a circular society.
Changing production and value chainsWithin this research line, topics of attention are the redesign of products and value chains to meet circularity principles and the question how these changes, from a technological and sustainability point of view, can be adopted by society.
Systemic challenges to the transition to a circular societyThis research line focuses on the conflict between economic, legal political and cultural principles on the one hand and circularity principles and sustainability on the other, by investigating the various frameworks that need to be adopted to support circularity principles while contributing to sustainability for all.
Projects and Funding Opportunities
Projects
This community contributes to various transdisciplinary research projects of Utrecht University. Do you need help developing your project concerning the transition towards a circular society, or want to read more about our current projects? Check out our projects page.
Video
Circular Economy depends largely on producers taking responsibility for recycling of products after consumers dispose them and for improving their design. For various types of products (like cars, tyres, electronics, packaging, batteries) this extended producer responsibility has been introduced in the last few decades in the EU and also in the Netherlands as a legal obligation. In this video we show how this works and what needs to be improved to achieve the ambitious Dutch policy goals (reduction of the use of virgin resource for product with 50% by 2030). We discuss the garment sector as an example to show that the organisation model and the financial fee structure of extended producer responsibility schemes need to be renewed.
