This policy proposes promoting the circular economy to reduce global demand for natural resources, ensuring that the material foundations of wellbeing can be achieved across all countries within the natural boundaries of the planet. Every year, the global economy extracts more than 100 billion tonnes of resources from the earth, over three times as much as in 1970, and this figure is set to grow by a further 60% by 2060. This trajectory is driven by a linear model of production and consumption built around endless extraction, manufacture, use, and disposal of resources in the pursuit of economic growth. The consequence is that humanity has now passed seven out of nine planetary boundaries , while 1.1 billion people remain in poverty. The circular economy offers an alternative: it eliminates waste and pollution by design, keeps materials and products in use for as long as possible, and allows nature to regenerate. 49 governments have already adopted dedicated circular economy roadmaps or strategies , and over 120 million people worldwide already work in repair, recycling, second-hand trade, and waste management. The Roadmap goes further than existing national strategies, which focus primarily on recycling and waste management , by proposing five integrated policy priorities: shifting demand away from the most resource-intensive goods and services; embedding circular principles in global governance and trade; making resource extraction and pollution more expensive while reducing the costs of circular activities; requiring products to be designed to last; and directing investment toward circular businesses. Taken together, these policies pursue three goals that are directly relevant to tackling poverty in a post-growth framework. First, they seek to reduce demand for resources, especially by high-income countries and households, to mitigate environmental degradation, which is borne most heavily by communities in the Global South. Second, they enable low-income countries to build the housing, energy, food, and transport systems their populations need without replicating the wasteful development path of industrialised economies. Third, they support commodity-dependent countries in earning more from their resources and building more diverse economies. In doing so, the circular economy makes it possible for governments to improve people’s lives, and meaningfully reduce poverty, without requiring ever-increasing levels of resource extraction from the earth.
