A global analysis of circular economy initiatives: weak or strong sustainability?

In the face of climate change, the circular economy is attracting the attention of public authorities, international institutions, industry and academia. There is currently no consensus on its definition and it varies according to the sectors and actors. The objectives of this work are threefold: (i) to identify all the discourses and initiatives attributed to the circular economy in order to situate them according to whether they belong to weak or strong sustainability; (ii) to enhance the value of this information by centralizing it, and creating tools to facilitate its exploration and access; (iii) to analyze how these initiatives allow circular economy to address global sustainability. Questions regarding data sources and processing of this information were raised to facilitate the collection of relevant data. This work focuses on information published on social networks, in particular Twitter called X now. Several data processing techniques such as text mining, geocoding and knowledge graph generation are applied. Data visualization tools are used to show the distribution of the data on a spatial, thematic and temporal level. The results obtained confirm the over-representation of circular economy practices based on weak sustainability in developed countries, while circular economy initiatives based on strong sustainability are most common in the Global South. This paper provides evidence on the social contribution of circular economy, which is less addressed in the technocentric approach.