Broad implementation of a circular economy (CE) will bring new and different challenges for Canada’s economy. A CE will favour durable, reusable, recyclable and/or compostable materials, and correspondingly will likely increase demand for strategic raw materials that better accommodate product designs to meet these requirements. Identifying policies and strategies to increase innovations for improved recycling, recovery, quality-assurance, and traceability of material resources will be necessary to take advantage of the opportunity presented by an increasingly circular global economy. However, to do so we must also develop the indicators and modelling approaches needed to monitor and assess the advancement towards a CE in Canada.
This report aims to explore the relevant indicators and tools needed to monitor progress towards a CE at a national level for Canada, and what data and information is required to further modelling such indicators in the Canadian context. To better understand potential future pathways for a CE in Canada the report sought to provide insights and details about the indicators and tools that can be used to answer three major questions:
- How circular is the Canadian economy?
- How to improve the material circularity of Canada?
- To what extent a Canadian circular economy is a step toward a sustainable society?
A key take-away from this review is that measurements of material circularity cannot simply sum up kilograms of materials -- there are different dimensions to consider depending on the diversity of substances to account for, the diversity of economic sectors, and the consequences for society on different timeframes. Modelling approaches, objectives, and data requirements are not independent, and the required data collection and analysis frameworks need to be chosen accordingly.
The issue of how to effectively monitor progress towards CE is therefore an emerging and ongoing debate. As our findings illustrate, measuring the circularity of a system is challenging and there is no common agreement on how to capture the whole spectrum of CE strategies within one consistent assessment framework.
