Circular economy is a popular notion promoted by the EU, by a number of national governments and by many businesses around the world. However, it looks like a collection of visionary ideas without a firm scientific basis. We try to place it in the framework of sustainability and outline some of the existing limitations of the current form of the concept. The second part of the paper presents an overview of the rate of adoption of circular economy approaches at global, European and industry level and the challenges to their application
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