Sustainability is a core tenet of PC Landscapes’ ethos and is intrinsically linked to not just our environment, but also our economy.
The notion of a ‘circular economy’ is one which emphasises the sustainable and continuous reuse of materials within the economy, and minimisation of waste. The Ellen Macarthur Foundation, committed to the creation of a circular economy, describes it as an economic system in which ‘products and materials are kept in circulation through processes like maintenance, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacture, recycling, and composting’ and tackles climate change, biodiversity loss, waste and pollution ‘by decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources.’
While a desirable and ecologically necessary endeavour, how close really are we to living in a circular economy?
A Global Circular Economy?
Beginning on a macro-level: how circular is the global economy?
In 2018, the Circle Economy thinktank published a report on the extent to which the global economy was becoming a circular one, the first of its kind, called the Circularity Gap Report (CGR). It analysed how materials which flow into, accumulate, and exit the global economy contribute to or hinder a circular economy, revealing that the world economy was 9.1% circular.
This revealed a huge ‘circularity gap’, showing that the overwhelming majority of materials which enter and accumulate within the global economy leave it as waste – contributing to climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss – a fundamentally unsustainable situation.
Recycling rates have increased significantly over the last few decades, especially in Europe, and the CGR predict that if were to recycle all recyclable materials global circularity could potentially rise as high as 25% without reducing consumption. This paints a positive image, but if those findings were published in 2018, where are we now?
Behind, unfortunately. The 2025 CGR found that despite the growing momentum of the movement for a circular economy, policies to support it, and prevalent recycling efforts, global circularity declined from 9.1% in 2018 to a disappointing 6.9% in 2025. Such news ties in with global reduction in the rate of recycling for the eighth year in a row, with the rise in resource consumption accelerating far beyond the rise in global population and therefore the quantity of waste produced outpacing recycling systems.
Global extraction of resources has reached one hundred billion tonnes per annum according to the 2025 GCR, with current trends prompting Circle Economy to predict a further 60% rise by 2060. While many companies have implemented sustainability pledges and commitments, even more continue to act with impunity extracting increasing quantities of resources and generating increasing quantities of waste and pollution. But is there no hope?
What Are Companies Actually Doing?
While many companies – particularly in consumer goods industries like fashion, food and drink, and household items (think Coca Cola, Unilever, P&G) have been criticised for obstructing progress towards a circular economy, greater sustainability and a reduction in non-recyclable waste – many others within and without those industries have been seeking to work towards a less wasteful future.
Recently, retail chain Marks & Spencer announced that they would be opening a second-hand clothing store using the online retail platform eBay. More than 10 years ago, M&S established a clothes-swapping initiative called Another Life whereby customers could hand in to them an old piece of clothing when they bought a new one, the donated clothing going on to be sold by the charity Oxfam, a partner of M&S in this endeavour.
While Another Life donations may have slowed, M&S hopes that offering vouchers for their eBay store when customers spend £35 will renew momentum for their sustainability drives. 15% of the profits from the eBay store will go to Oxfam, and those clothes which cannot be resold will be repurposed and recycled. M&S therefore stands out and sets an example of a responsible, community- and environmentally-conscious fashion-retail company. The scheme not only incentivises a reduction in net consumption but also ensures unwanted clothes do not become waste, being resold or recycled.
This comes at a time when the second-hand (‘pre-loved’) clothing industry is booming – a great sign for progress towards a circular economy – with second-hand marketplace Depop predicted to surpass $1 billion of annual sales this year, and rival Vinted witnessing a sales rise of 41% for 2024. Depop and Vinted have reshaped the fashion-retail industry’s approach to second-hand clothes, shifting how consumers and producers alike see old clothing from charity-shop trash-pieces to fashion must-haves. Along these lines, clothes retailers Primark and H&M – often historically accused of being top perpetrators of fast-fashion waste – have begun to make shop-floor space for pre-loved pieces.
While they are only a handful of companies, their success sends signals to firms within and without the fashion-retail industry to do the same.
What Are Politicians Actually Doing?
There is more movement in the political and legislative sphere in the way of bringing about a circular economy than the 2025 CGR figure of 6.9% might lead you to believe, albeit this is mostly confined to wealthier, developed countries where consumption per capita is higher.
In the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), a federal territory within Australia containing the capital city Canberra, the Circular Economy Act 2023 has helped lay out a vision for a circular economy in that region and Australia as a whole. Although Australia lags behind most of Western Europe and Japan on the EPI Waste Recovery Rate index, possessing a score of 41.1 on a scale of zero (lots of waste) to one hundred (minimal waste) in 2024, the notion of a circular economy has gained considerable traction there.
The ACT’s Circular Economy Act 2023 established a framework for future regulation on business waste. According to ACT State of the Environment, these regulations will ‘require businesses to have a separate collection for co-mingled recycling and organic waste collection, as well as a food waste reduction plan,’ and has expanded the power of the ACT Legislative Assembly to double-down on bans of single-use plastics and pollutive non-plastic products.
Beyond the ACT, environment ministers from all Australian state met in June 2023 and reiterated their commitment to creating a circulatory economic system for Australia by 2030, as established in the National Waste Policy 2018. There is a long way to go, but the cooperation of politicians on a national scale is integral to bringing sustainability and a circular economy to fruition.
More recently, in the United Kingdom the Scottish Parliament passed the Circular Economy (Scotland) Act 2024 in June of last year. The Act commits Scotland to a ‘circular economy based on sustainable consumption, production, and resource management.’ The Act seeks to contribute to combatting climate change, preventing biodiversity loss, and improving the environment while also growing the economy, generating new and innovative market opportunities, increasing productivity and saving money.
A progressive policy for the UK which is already committed to major global environmental treaties like the Kyoto Protocol and 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as a commitment to achieving net zero by 2050, the Scottish Circular Economy act is a productive step forward in getting the notion of building a circular economy into the British political mainstream. That said, economic circularity has been institutionalised to some extent in British politics already, with Mary Creagh MP, the incumbent Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Minister for Nature), officially listed as being responsible for ‘circular economy’ as part of her ministerial position.
Although the list of countries legislating towards a circular economy is a short one, the ones that have are making strong headway in setting global precedent for a less wasteful economy.
Concluding Remarks
It is easy to paint a bleak picture of the future of the circular economy, especially when considering the CGR decline between 2018 and 2025 and falling rates of recycling. Time is of course of the essence and prioritising sustainability and reducing waste has never been as important as it is now.
But companies and legislatures are making active efforts to establish the commercial precedents and to build legal and regulatory frameworks which can push us towards a circular economy and away from a linear, extractive one.
It is important that we consider sustainability, circularity, and the minimisation of waste in everything we do – as we do at PC Landscapes, reacting to client’s personal choices and incorporating these principles into our landscapes and gardens in our design process utilising Elemental, an environmental and carbon-calculating tool that we assisted in development.
As the growing second-hand fashion market booms, it has never been more clear how consumers and producers in any industry can reshape how we interact with, recycle, and minimise waste in responsible, sustainable, and economically fruitful ways to bring about a cleaner and greener future.
How close are we to a circular economy? That’s up to us.