Global environmental and socio‐economic impacts of a transition to a circular economy in metal and electrical products: A Dutch case study

Shifting from a linear to a circular economy could decouple environmental footprints from an ever growing global GDP. As footprints are increasingly driven by international trade, such a shift in a national economy would have global implications. In this study, we explore the global environmental and socio-economic impacts of hypothetical circular policy interventions affecting the consumption of metal and electrical products in the Netherlands. We use environmentally extended multi regional input-output analysis and use repair activities as a proxy to model other circularity activities. Compared with a business-as-usual scenario of final demand for metal and electrical products in the Netherlands, we find that the considered interventions yield a decrease in global environmental and socio-economic impacts (average change -7%), and an increase in domestic employment (+13%) and value added (+2%), as well as a modest increase in most domestic environmental impacts (+1% on average). We explore whether these interventions would lead to resource decoupling (i.e., both economic activity and its associated environmental impacts grow, but the former more strongly than the latter) and/or impact decoupling (i.e., economic activity grows and impacts decrease). Domestically we observe resource decoupling while globally both environmental impacts and economic activity are reduced. Our findings thus challenge the assumption that the implantation of circular economy policies will lead to global resource decoupling, instead suggesting that the social and economic benefits of a circular transition are unequally distributed across regions.