Assessing sustainability and circularity: an empirical analysis of companies with circular economy practices

The circular economy (CE) concept has become a major trend among companies, promising new business opportunities and a decrease in harmful environmental impacts. Though research on circular business models has recently increased, only few scholars have investigated whether CE practices also yield the sustainability results they promise. Therefore, establishing the empirical status quo of circularity and sustainability assessments provides a way forward and enables targeted improvements of applied assessment approaches with academic findings. This paper presents the results of an empirical analysis conducted through a qualitative survey in the Netherlands and Italy, where the major part of research on the nexus of circularity and sustainability assessments has been produced. The survey was distributed online to over 800 representatives of companies. Purposive sampling was employed to target only firms associated with national and international CE networks, assuming these companies already implement and assess CE best practices at varying levels of maturity. They thus can be defined as “front-running CE businesses”. Within a three months’ timeframe, 155 companies provided information on their understanding of the CE concept, its relationship with sustainability, as well as the assessment approaches used for the monitoring and reporting of CE and sustainability aspects. The survey answers show that companies view CE as one of the tools to achieve sustainable development improvements, particularly in the environmental domain. Yet, the respondents are ambiguous towards the question of whether CE can also provide economic benefits to firms. Furthermore, self-developed sustainability indicators were the most frequent assessment approach on a company level, while Life Cycle Assessment related methodologies prevailed on a product level. Given the qualitative nature of the survey, the observed tendencies are to be scrutinised through semi-structured interviews in a next step. Further research advancements will also include the survey distribution in other European and non-European countries to enable regional comparisons.