Adequacy of existing circular economy assessment tools for higher education institutions

Abstract

Circular economy (CE) has been identified as a key strategy to contribute to sustainable development and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda. In this context, organisations have started to demand methods to measure and monitor their level of circularity. To facilitate this task, several CE tools have been developed in recent years, which automatically measure, track and communicate the level of circularity of organisations based on answers to qualitative questions. In particular, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), as organisations engaged in education, research and community services, play an important role in promoting sustainability and should be an example in the transition process towards CE. Therefore, they need approaches that allow them to measure and monitor their transition towards CE. The aim of this study is to analyse the adequacy of existing CE tools for HEIs, to check whether they consider the specificities of HEIs and to identify the required changes to make them suitable for HEIs. For this purpose, seven existing CE tools were applied to four Spanish HEIs, and were analysed and evaluated through interviews with the environmental managers of these HEIs. The results show that the existing CE tools need to be reformulated in order to make them suitable for assessing the level of circularity of HEIs and to make their outputs useful for decision-making. As a conclusion, it has been found that it is better to develop a specific CE tool for HEIs, in order to incorporate the specificities and peculiarities of such complex type of organisation, including the teaching, research and management areas.