Circular Economy: New Opportunities for Growth

Circular economy’s approach attracts a lot of followers nowadays. It mobilizes not just public authorities, but the social responsible business as well. Although circular economy (CE) was established as strategy for clean environment, it overpassed the need of recycling and waste management mechanisms. It covers new business models that generate added value through optimizing the resource’s and energy’s inputs not by single company but by the whole added value chain. Transition to a circular economy is based on reducing not just the waste but the primary recourses as well as increasing of waste reuses. Circular economy actions are closely linked to key EU priorities, including jobs, growth, climate, and energy. The goal of the paper is to explore the opportunities from application of the circular economy principles for forcing up not just economic growth but improving quality of life. The used methods are as follows: descriptive, quantitative, and qualitative analysis of main indicators of circular economy, statistical analysis of the business model: production level—resources productivity—waste generation—circularity rate—investments in circular economy subsectors. As the analysis shows heterogeneity among EU countries in application of the circular economy approach, there is different speed of transferring economic growth from linear to circular subsectors. There is proved that some of the EU economies are fully linear and they delay real shift between linear and circular business models. Bulgaria needs as soon as possible to enforce the acceptance of newer CE strategy that covers the road from LE to CE. The main conclusion is to set new institutional measures for those EU economies that had to shift between linear and circular business models.