Welcome to Circular Economy, an interdisciplinary journal providing practical advice to businesses, policymakers and civil society to accelerate the transition towards a more circular economy. The journal is a collective effort by some of the leading scholars and practitioners in the circular spectrum who are excited about furthering the discourse on the concept of the circular economy and aim to bridge the gap between theory and implication. All our articles are open-access and oriented towards practical implications.

A Special Issue: ‘Towards a Circular Economy in Critical Value Chains’

Editors: Brian Baldassarre and Benjamin Sprecher

It is clear that our future economic system will be to a large degree circular. What is not clear is how to get there. This special issue calls for papers that focus on how a circular economy approach (reduce, reuse, recycle) might be leveraged to mitigate EU dependencies from critical products, components, and raw materials across sensitive value chains (please see EU industrial strategy 2020). For example, the ICT sector is critical for the EU economy, yet during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic the supply of chips was disrupted. In this context, a circular approach based on the reuse of chips recovered from ICT products might be relevant to mitigate the risk of similar disruptions in the future, especially considering that the semiconductor industry and related production of chips is largely based in the region of Taiwan, whose autonomy is increasingly threatened by China. Similar critical value chains include that of EV batteries, as well as those of most renewable energy technologies, where resilience is now particularly pressing to mitigate EU’s fossil fuel dependency from Russia.

We invite multidisciplinary research contributions focusing on these and other value chains, with a focus on material flows and product engineering issues, complemented by important economic (e.g., circular business models, financial flows, etc.) and geopolitical considerations (international relations, policies, etc.). We especially invite contributions from the field of economics and political economy. We also highlight that there has been a fair amount of research on recycling, but less so on reduction of raw-material demand, including through re-use and remanufacturing.

Submission guidelines

Please mind the following deadlines for this issue:

• Abstracts should be submitted before 30 June 2023
• Full papers to be submitted by 1 September 2023
• Peer review process to be completed by 31 October 2023
• Full paper deadline (if accepted): 31 December 2023
• Special issue for issue 3.1. To be published in April 2024