The concept of circular economy (CE) has recently gained momentum in the political, scientific, and economic debate, especially in China and Europe. As a result, organizations and scholars have started to establish different sets of principles for its adoption. For this reason, it is important to identify and assess the differences and similarities among existing sets of CE principles, and how organizations and individuals understand and translate them into practice. In this paper, we firstly present a brief review and analysis of the coherence among six existing sets of principles. Our analysis finds that, despite the mixed degree of coherence, all sets describe the necessity to implement CE principles at all levels of a company. We then present the results of an in-depth qualitative survey that investigates how 19 key informants representing small, medium, and multinational companies based in China understand and carry out the CE principles laid out by the BSI standard BS 8001:2017; how these principles can transform the culture and processes of these companies; and what are the opportunities and threats that such transformation can bring. Results describe a good awareness and knowledge of the CE principles and an optimistic outlook concerning their adoption. At the same time, numerous barriers and threats that the implementation of these principles might entail are presented. Overall, respondents confirm the complexity of implementing the principles of the CE in an integrated and consistent way in the management and strategies of Chinese companies and highlight the challenges that might arise during their implementation.

An inventory of chromium emission into the atmosphere and water from anthropogenic activities in China was compiled for 1990 through to 2009. We estimate that the total emission of chromium to the atmosphere is about 1.92×10⁵t. Coal and oil combustion were the two leading sources of chromium emission to the atmosphere in China, while the contribution of them showed opposite annual growth trend. In total, nearly 1.34×10⁴t of chromium was discharged to water, mainly from six industrial categories in 20 years. Among them, the metal fabrication industry and the leather tanning sector were the dominant sources of chromium emissions, accounting for approximately 68.0% and 20.0% of the total emissions and representing increases of15.6% and 10.3% annually, respectively. The spatial trends of Cr emissions show significant variation based on emissions from 2005 to 2009. The emission to the atmosphere was heaviest in Hebei, Shandong, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Shanxi, whose annual emissions reached more than 1000t for the high level of coal and oil consumption. In terms of emission to water, the largest contributors were Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong and Zhejiang, where most of the leather production and metal manufacturing occur and these four regions accounted for nearly 47.4% of the total emission to water.