To what extent are circular economy strategies accounted in science-based targets for carbon emission reduction?

Following the Paris Agreement, renewed carbon mitigation efforts have been advanced by engaging the global corporate sector towards active leadership to stabilize global atmospheric temperatures. The Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is now recognized as a central vector to promote absolute or Science-Based (SB) Paris-aligned emission targets for the corporate sector. By establishing specific SB targets for each individual company or sector, SBTi allows the private sector to voluntarily engage and commit to carbon reduction efforts. Following the SBTi procedure, companies shall account for their carbon emissions according to a base year and set up ambitious SB targets to reduce their emission over time. Until now, SBTi has attracted nearly 8600 companies in more than 50 sectors accounting for a volume of 53 million tons of CO2e reduction commitments and is further attracting many more companies. However, there is now an urgent research need to understand how and in which modalities companies can realistically and credibly achieve their SBTi targets. Implementing circular economy (CE) strategies, such as recirculation of products/parts (e.g., reuse, repair, remanufacture) via long-life products or new business models, or recycling measures are highly promising to achieve the SBTi targets. Nevertheless, current approaches for calculating CE carbon reduction potentials and accounting for their performance along companies’ SBTi journey are not comprehensively represented. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the approaches for calculating carbon reduction performance for CE strategies to investigate how manufacturing companies (in particular non-energy-intensive) can account for their CE strategies’ performance to achieve SBTi targets. Our results show that while the GHG Protocol (GHGP) provides several methodologies, a few CE strategies remain uncovered, which, highlights the present need to better incorporate CE into the methodological layout for manufacturing companies engaged in SBTi.