Assessing economy-wide prospects for a more sustainable circular economy in South Africa (Material Flow Analysis)

The circular economy (CE) concept is gaining increasing traction as a comprehensive environmental-economic strategy towards a more sustainable economy, however due to competing claims and high expectations, it now has to provide its validity. For this purpose, systematic comprehensive empirical assessments are required, to understand the status-quo and to be able to derive robust guidance without simply shifting problems. Recently, a comprehensive economy-wide monitoring framework covering all materials and energy use, as well as resulting waste and emissions has been developed by BOKU (Haas et al. 2015; Jacobi et al. 2018; Mayer et al. 2019; De Vit et al. 2019). This economy-wide CE monitoring framework has been adopted into the European Commissions’ circular economy policy package as their macro-level headline approach (European Commission 2018a, 2018b) and has become part of the raw material score board (European Union et al. 2016, 2018). This monitoring framework enables: • assessing the degree of circularity vis a vis the overall size and dynamics of the physical economy, thereby providing headline indicators for policy and communication efforts • providing systems-level insights into potentials for improving circularity and sustainability • enables investigating the nexus between climate relevant emissions and circularity • provides robust and comprehensive information even in the case of missing data, e.g. on waste flows, due to its data triangulation and mass-balancing approach. In this project, this monitoring framework is used to inform and guide strategies to increase the sustainable circularity of the South African economy. In South Africa, resource use (Schandl et al. 2017), as well as waste quantities and subsequent waste management policies have rapidly expanded in the past years and the circular economy has been proposed as a new sustainable resource use and waste management paradigm (Godfrey and Oelofse 2017). However, a comprehensive assessment of the current state and prospects for increasing the circularity of the South African economy has not been conducted yet. In this research project, we adapt the previously developed CE-monitoring framework as applied for the EU-28, to investigate the case of South Africa. This will allow various South African stakeholders, e.g. national and local government, business, NGOs, etc., identify opportunity areas for increasing circularity within the South Africa economy, in an effort to domesticate the CE to the South African developing country context. It provides an evidence-based approach to identify strategic intervention areas within the South African economy to increase circularity, with the intention of supporting local economic development and job creation.