A new value based resource efficiency indicator to measure the progress of Circular Economy, from concepts to practise

In the last decade, the Circular Economy (CE) is receiving increasing attention worldwide as a way to overcome the inefficient “take-make-dispose” economic model. Increasing resource efficiency is essential to sustain socio-economic progress and to reduce the environmental consequences of the high level of resource consumption. Decision makers seek to promote resource efficiency throughout appropriate indicators. However, most of the methodologies developed so far, fail to reflect socio-economic goals and do not take into account the quality of resources. This master thesis provides a new Value based Resource Efficiency indicator (VRE) to assess the performance of industrial sectors or countries in terms of resource use and to measure their level of circularity. The ultimate goal of the VRE indicator is to use the monetary value of resources rather than mass, since the market value incorporates both the information of quality and quantity of goods. In addition, it reflects the elements of scarcity and competition. This work provides a methodology and calculation procedures to compute the VRE indicator for 28 European countries and other 15 countries in the World, and for 62 industrial sectors within those countries. Results are calculated for a time series of 14 years (from 2000 to 2014). This work also provides comparisons of the input structures of the same industrial sectors in diverse countries that gives useful insights about the resources used to produce a final output. This allows comparison among countries, and they may inspire political decisions. The main findings are that VRE is a useful tool to measure the progress of Circular Economy on a macro-level; is a simple, robust, reliable and intuitive indicator and it responds automatically to the location and time for which it is calculated. Further research could be focused either on the extension of this approach considering different data sources and on the validation of this proposal in a case study.