Circular Economy: indicators and measurements

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Measuring circular economy in the EU

The current (2025) backbone is the revised EU Circular Economy Monitoring Framework (2023), which uses 11 indicators in 5 dimensions (production/consumption, waste management, secondary raw materials, competitiveness & innovation, and global sustainability).

Monitoring framework - Circular economy - Eurostat

Macro level

For my DYNAMO project, which focuses on the Finnish markets, the most important macro level indicators are

  • Circular material use rate (CMUR, “circularity rate”) – share of total material use that comes from recycled materials. EU-27 was about 11.8 % in 2023, with a Green Deal target to roughly double to 23.2 % by 2030 (European Commission).
  • Material footprint / raw material consumption (RMC) – raw materials used globally to satisfy domestic demand, per capita and per euro of GDP. Newly elevated to a core indicator in the revised framework (UNECE).
    • This tells how “material-hungry” the economy is; Finland sits high due to mining, forestry and infrastructure.
  • Resource productivity – GDP divided by domestic material consumption. This is essentially “how much value per tonne”.
  • Waste generation and recycling rates – total municipal waste, packaging waste by material, construction and demolition waste, % recycled, % landfilled or incinerated (Eurostat: Circular economy - material flows).
    • These are the workhorse indicators; crude, but crucial for seeing whether anything is actually flowing back into the system.
  • Secondary raw materials and trade – indicators for trade in recyclable materials and “import dependency” for key materials, now explicitly part of the EU monitoring revision (UNECE). For CRMs in particular, this is the bridge from circularity to security-of-supply.

Meso level (sector and value-chain indicators)

Critical raw materials

For CRMs, the useful indicators are:

  • End-of-life recycling rate for specific metals (cobalt, nickel, rare earths, lithium, etc.).
  • Recycling input rate – share of total use of a material in the EU that comes from scrap/recycled sources.
    • The CRM-specific analogue to CMUR; the main “market size for secondary CRM” indicator.
  • Import dependency / supply risk index – now part of both the CRMA and the EU monitoring revision
    • high dependency combined with low recycling input; policy support probably incoming

For Finland, combining these with ENVIMAT or MFA could allow us to say things like: “raising Li recycling input from 5 % to 25 % by 2035 corresponds to X kt/year and Y M€/year domestic secondary market under plausible price ranges”.

Construction

Key indicators:

  • C&D waste recovery rate, split into:
    • high-value recycling and reuse (components, structural steel, high-grade aggregates), and
    • low-value backfilling or downcycling.
  • Recycled content in building materials – % recycled aggregate in concrete, % scrap in reinforcing and structural steel, % reused components per project.
  • Material intensity of the building stock – tonnes of materials per m² of floor area by type (concrete, brick, steel, timber).
    • Coupled with demolition/renovation rates can give a forecast of secondary material potential per year.

From a markets perspective, the key question is: “what fraction of new demand for aggregates, steel and timber could be met from secondary flows under feasible reuse/recycling rates, and what does that do to primary producers and to demolition contractors?”

Plastics

Has a well-defined indicator ecosystem:

  • Plastic packaging recycling rate – 50 % by 2025 and 55 % by 2030 are the EU targets; Finland is playing catch-up after Eurostat flagged it as at risk of missing the 2025 target.
  • Collection rate vs effective recycling rate – especially important because a lot of collected plastic has historically gone to energy recovery; tracking both is essential for real circularity.
  • Recycled content in products – e.g. PET bottles (25–30 % mandatory), other packaging under the forthcoming PPWR.
    • This is a very direct market-pull indicator: each percentage point mandate is tonnes of demand for recyclate.
  • Deposit-return performance – Finland’s 95–96 % return rate for PET bottles is already an existence proof of near-closed-loop plastics in that niche, and a benchmark for “what good looks like” for other packaging streams.

For market analysis, those last two tell the minimum demand floor for secondary plastics under regulatory constraints.

Textiles

Here indicators are more immature, but rapidly evolving:

  • Per-capita textile consumption and waste – EEA now tracks consumption and waste trends.
  • Separate collection rate for post-consumer textiles – driven by the 2025 WFD deadline.
  • Shares to reuse, downcycling and fibre-to-fibre recycling – still small for true fibre-to-fibre (≈1 % globally), but this is the number that becomes “addressable feedstock” for domestic recycling industry development (Circularity of the EU textiles value chain in numbers - EEA).
  • Recycled content in new textiles – not yet regulated EU-wide, but likely to come; coalitions are already lobbying for mandatory recycled content thresholds ([Could This Coalition Fix Europe’s Mounting Textile Waste Challenge?Vogue](https://www.vogue.com/article/could-this-coalition-fix-europes-mounting-textile-waste-challenge)).

For market potential in Finland, the combination of “kg textiles placed on market” + “kg separately collected” + “share that can technically go to fibre-to-fibre” gives concrete volume estimates for plants like Rester/LSJH and for future Infinited-Fibre-type facilities.

Micro level (product and company circularity)

Micro level indicators fall into two big families: design-oriented indicators and portfolio/strategy indicators.

The main design metric is the Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) developed by Ellen MacArthur Foundation (Material Circularity Indicator | Ellen MacArthur Foundation). It scores individual products (and by aggregation, companies) based on:

  • fraction of input from recycled/renewable sources,
  • fraction of output that is recycled or reused,
  • product lifetime compared to industry average, and
  • losses in collection and processing.

MCI is particularly useful if you want to compare design choices (e.g. textile product A vs B, or a “standard” vs “circular” building component), and then link that back to macro indicators through LCA/IO models.

For companies, EMF’s Circulytics gives a broader scorecard that mixes material flow metrics with organisational enablers (strategy, innovation, people, etc.) (Circulytics: Measuring circular economy performance | Ellen MacArthur Foundation).

From a researcher’s perspective, the details are less interesting than the fact that large firms are beginning to publish “percentage of revenue from circular business models” and “percentage of mass flow that is circular” as KPIs. Those can be used as empirical inputs or calibration targets for e.g. ABMs and market models.

There is also a dizzying variety of other indicators in the literature – hundreds, by some reviews – but most are variants or composites of the above. OECD/UNECE are trying to rationalise this into a more coherent indicator set for countries, but at company level it is still a bit of a Wild West (OECD: Monitoring Progress towards a Resource-Efficient and Circular Economy).

Most relevant for current work (2025-11-28)

  • At macro level: CMUR, material footprint per capita, resource productivity, and total waste generation & recycling rates by stream.
    • These give the policy framing and “distance to target”.
  • At sector level:
    • CRMs: recycling input rates and import dependency for key metals;
    • Construction: high-value C&D reuse/recycling share and recycled content in major materials;
    • Plastics: packaging recycling rate vs target, recycled content obligations, DRS performance;
    • Textiles: separate collection rate, shares to reuse vs recycling, and emerging fibre-to-fibre volumes.
  • At micro level: a simple MCI or MCI-lite for a few representative products in each sector
    • mainly to connect design assumptions in ABM/SD models to a recognised metric.

The real question, hopefully answerable by combining ENVIMAT with ABMs, would then becomes how do specific policy packages and business models move these indicators, and what volumes and margins do they imply for Finnish CE markets? The indicators themselves are not the point; they’re the scoreboard.