The Contested realities of the Circular Economy

We acknowledge that the CE is not one ‘thing’, but, rather, could be seen as an ‘empty signifier’ (Valenzuela and Bohm 2017), which allows for a whole range of interpretations and approaches to be bundled together under the term ‘circular economy’. Indeed, the CE is said to have 114 definitions (Kirchherr et al. 2017), which implies that academics and practitioners do not necessarily agree on precisely what the CE entails and how it should be...