Regulating the Circular Economy and Plastics in the OECD World

This paper aims at providing a systematic stocktaking of the policy measures taken as part of a Circular Economy (CE) agenda to address health, environmental, and resource challenges posed by plastics. CE is an economic system that replaces the ‘end-of-life’ concept with reducing, alternatively reusing, recycling, and recovering materials in production and consumption processes to accomplish sustainable development. It has become a key concept that guides the environmental policy agenda in many jurisdictions across the globe, including Asia and Europe. With the CE policy agenda gaining traction, we see a growth of CE-oriented policies, as many governments have gradually intensified their efforts to improve the efficiency of primary resource use, reduce waste production and increase material recovery and reuse. In parallel, there is increased effort by corporations to adopt industry standards, voluntary agreements and develop CE business models The purpose of the research is twofold: first, to assess empirically the degree of adoption of policies and regulations addressing plastics in OECD countries; second, to explore theoretically and empirically the conditions and drivers under which this policy output is emerging. While in past years, the importance of CE policies has grown significantly, the evolving interdisciplinary literature on CE has not systematically taken stock of the increase and diversity of CE policies and regulations. Compared to other areas of environmental law and policy-making, there is a crucial lack of systematic cross-temporal and cross-country data on this emerging field of regulation. To systematically address the dynamics in CE plastics regulation, the paper uses analyzes the private and public regulation adopted between the years 2000 to 2021 in a sample of 12 OECD countries (both EU and non-EU). The paper uses a two-dimensional policy portfolio approach that captures the policy targets (‘what is regulated?’) and the policy instruments (‘how is it regulated?’). Using this two-dimensional approach promises to capture both the number and the diversity of policy instruments used to achieve CE goals in the plastics value chain. It will allow us to refine our understanding of how comprehensive the scope of regulation is in different countries in terms of the targets and the legal and regulatory tools used to address these targets.