THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY: A Slippery Step on the Path to Sustainability?
Abstract
Kieren Mayers, Tom Davis, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove explain how the unquestioning adoption of the circular economy approach to sustainable resource use will lead us to unintended environmental consequences. There is no magic bullet; wise use of the earth’s resources requires us to embrace the complexity of our industrial ecosystems and more carefully account for our impact on a case-by-case basis.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The smartphone sector remains constrained by a narrow focus on end-of-life strategies, particularly recycling, while overlooking value retention strategies such as reuse, repair and refurbishment.
“Yet, the smartphone sector remains constrained by a narrow focus on end-of-life (EoL) strategies, particularly recycling while overlooking value retention strategies such as reuse, repair and refurbishment (Guo et al. 2023;Mayers et al. 2023).”
From Integrating Life Cycle Assessment, Monetised Externalities and Value Alignment for Strategic Reconfiguration of Circular Business Models: The Case of Smartphones (2026) · cites this paper as Mayers et al. 2023
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Rittershaus, P., Aryan, V., Sánchez, D., Renner, M., & Poeppelbuss, J. (2026) · Business Strategy and the Environment · doi:10.1002/bse.70271 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
- Authors
- Mayers, K., Davis, T., & Van Wassenhove, L. N.
- Affiliations
- INSEAD (FR)
- Hewlett-Packard (United States) (US)
- INSEAD
- ORCID
- Mayers, Kieren
- Venue
- Management and Business Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2023-06-01
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 16-22
- ISSN
- 2694-104X (ISSN-L)
- 2694-1058
- OpenAlex
- W4401720985
- Cited by
- 2
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2
- FWCI
- 0.43
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Management and business review. (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Sustainable Supply Chain Management
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering › Sustainable Industrial Ecology
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › Environmental Sustainability in Business
- Keywords
- circular economy, sustainability, sustainable resource use, industrial ecosystems, resource utilization (natural resources), environmental impact assessment
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
