Quantifying the circularity of regional industrial waste across multi-channel enterprises

Circular economy is a theoretical concept that is widely discussed in recent literature as a way to achieve increased sustainability. However, published literature focuses on how to increase circularity without analysing the status quo of circularity, which necessitates answering the question of how to measure the effectiveness of any actions implemented to advance Circular economy. Currently, there is no agreed methodology in literature on measuring the existing circularity. Therefore, this article proposes an analytical way to measure and map a regional waste economy’s circularity. The framework can be applied at a granularity of an individual materials level as well as overall at a regional level, and can quantify with a potential to improve towards a more circular economy in value as well as in volume. Data mining, conditioning, and, mathematical analysis was conducted across a number of public and private databases such as ORBIS and The Environment Agency. The proposed framework was tested taking a case of a region in the North East of England with 35,116 active companies. The methodology was validated on a different data set from another region. The results show that the methodology is able to measure a regional circularity overall as well as at an individual material level. The outcome of this research would be useful for policy makers as well as manufacturing organisations, and waste management companies as benchmarking allows a comparison between effectiveness of regional environmental regulations with their influence on driving sustainability and circular economy.