(1) Background: The application of concepts linked to the circular economy (CE) has led to a sudden development of studies in numerous fields. However, the level of environmental sustainability of CE strategies could be improved and this topic deserves more attention by the scientific community. This research addresses this gap and aims at presenting a new concept, named circular ecology (CE_L), and its application to the field of waste management. (2) Methods: The paper presents a literature review on the criticalities of CE and on examples of studies that implement the CE_L principles. (3) Results: The review highlights that CE_L principles are widely applied to several fields of waste management, showing promising opportunities to export the results to other geographical contexts. (4) Conclusions: If supported by governments, CE_L approaches may allow solving multiple environmental problems at once, with clear economic, time, resources, and emission savings.

Waste management in European Union has long being regulated by the 4Rs principle, i.e. reduction, reuse, recycling, recovery, with landfill disposal as the last option. This vision recently led the European Union (especially since 2015) to the introduction of virtuous goals based on the rejection of linear economy in favour of circular economy strongly founded on materials recovery. In this scenario, landfill disposal option will disappear, while energy recovery may appear controversial when not applied to biogas production from anaerobic digestion. The present work aims to analyse the effects that circular economy principles introduced in the European Union context will have on the thermochemical waste treatment plants design. Results demonstrate that indirect combustion (gasification + combustion) along with integrated vitrification of the non-combustible fraction of treated waste will have a more relevant role in the field of waste treatment than in the past, thanks to the compliance of this option with the principles of circular economy.