Stylized Facts for the Circular Economy

The circular economy literature has grown rapidly over the past decade, but its findings remain scattered across disciplines, geographies, and methodological traditions — making it difficult for policymakers and practitioners to know what is actually established versus what is contested or context-dependent. This project addresses that gap through the concept of “stylized facts”: concise, empirically grounded propositions that distill what is reliably known about a system into a form that is both rigorous and usable.

Working across an international consortium of circular economy researchers, the project reviewed the CE literature and synthesized its findings into a structured set of stylized facts covering material flows, governance, economic dynamics, and social dimensions of circularity. The process involved iterative expert deliberation to distinguish well-supported claims from those that are plausible but insufficiently evidenced.

The resulting knowledge synthesis, led by Stefan Pauliuk and co-authored by 25 researchers across Europe and North America, is in preparation for the Journal of Industrial Ecology. The work is intended to serve as a living reference for the field — giving policymakers a credible foundation for CE strategy and giving researchers a map of where the evidence is strong, where it is thin, and where productive disagreement remains.