Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction: circular economy principles applied to solid waste management (SWM)
Significant technological and management innovations in waste management have emerged in the last decade in order to face the growing demand for materials and to confront the increasing ecological and social impact of the disposable consumer economy. Although some guidelines aim at reforming and improving traditional waste management frameworks, others are fundamentally designed to reconceptualize and reformulate them completely (DjuricIlic et al., 2018; Lauridsen and Jørgensen, 2010).
For the year 2016, official estimates (SNIS, 2018) indicate a daily average generation of 161,400 t municipal solid waste (MSW) in Brazil, where 59 percent were disposed in landfills, 19.9 percent were dumped in soil without any treatment, 3.4 percent were treated and recovered in sorting, composting and recycling units and 17.7 percent were without information.
In some European Union (EU) countries, such as Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden, public policies have raised the rates of reusing, recycling and incineration with energy recovery and/or composting to 95 percent (Eurostat, 2014; World Bank, 2013). Even having other destination technologies, sending MSW to landfills is still a major practice in the USA. In 2015, this option was used for 52.5 percent of the solid waste, followed by incineration with energy recovery (12.8 percent), recycling (25.8 percent) and composting (8.9 percent) (EPA, 2016).
In this context, the concept of circular economy (CE) emerges as an alternative response to the desire for sustainable development. However, the economy is still operating predominantly on a linear model basis of extraction, production, use and elimination/disposal, whereby all products will inevitably reach their end of life (European Union, 2012; UNEP, 2011; Stahel, 2016; Mangla et al., 2018).
According to Suavé et al. (2016) environmental science, sustainable development and CE are, in fact, important issues for conceptualizing solutions to a complex environment. In this way, CE models can be subdivided into two groups: those that promote reuse and extend the useful life of the waste or goods through repairing, fixing, remanufacturing, upgrading and reforming; and those that transform old goods into new resources through recycling and materials and waste treatment (Suavé et al., 2016). In this way, Geissdoerfer et al. (2017) define CE as a regenerative system, in which the...