This work explores the transition process towards a circular economic model in the European context. By placing the role of policies and waste as a focus of the debate, it first examines the possible effects that a stringent policy can generate and, secondly, how much waste and its management can influence the goodness of the transition process. By analyzing European data on major indicators of circularity, waste generation, and management, this paper attempts to provide a snapshot of the European situation and its different speeds along the transition path. In light of the recent development programs established by European institutions in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic that strained the world economy, the trends show how program resources should be directed towards key sustainability sectors that can stimulate European countries towards a common circular pathway.

The introduction of innovative practices compatible with the objectives of the circular economy is one of the main enablers for transforming current production patterns towards more sustainable and competitive systems. Understanding whether and to what extent firms are introducing circular-oriented innovations allows monitoring where we stand in the circular transition and thus which further efforts are needed to achieve a resource-efficient economy. This study is based on data from two surveys on Small and Medium Enterprises: the first one reaches 4565 companies located throughout Italy (in the two-year period 207-2018) and the second one focuses on 1603 companies operating in the Emilia-Romagna region (in the three-year period 2017-2019). The analysis is aimed at offering a broad picture of the level of involvement of national and regional firms in the implementation of circular innovation. Despite the overall positive performance, there appears to be a fragmented adoption of circular innovation in terms of firms’ size, technological intensity of the sectors and in accordance with the geography and the productive specialization of the territory. In general, circular innovation mainly involves firms operating in low-technology-intensity sectors in Southern Italy and more technological intensive sectors in Northern Italy and it is more widespread among large firms. On the contrary, in Emilia-Romagna, the distribution of circular innovation mainly concerns medium-sized firms, especially those belonging to low and medium technology-intensive sectors, moreover companies in the provinces of Modena and Parma show higher adoption rates.

Sustainable Waste Management (SWM) is key to achieving a full Circular Economy (CE). Monitoring the transformation path that the European Union (EU) Member States (MSs) are undertaking is, in fact, critical to assessing the impact and effectiveness of recent European waste legislation. Despite several studies have demonstrated positive performance and convergence in the treatement of waste at EU-MS level, efficiency evaluation analysis at regional level is still scant. This research attempts to benchmark Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management performance of 167 NUTS-2 regions in 20 EU-MSs between 2008-2013, and assess whether is there any positive convergence between EU regions. The efficiency assessment is done with 4 different models of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) - Benefit-of-Doubt (BoD), a non-parametric approach. The measurement is presented by the Composite Indicators (CI) which considers the multi-criteria of the main waste treatments. Our results reveal that despite a progressive convergence, still substantial differences in MSW management performances exist between EU-20 regions, even within the same country. Particularly, the analysis demonstrates that best performers are registered in Central and Northern EU NUTS-2 regions, while Eastern and Southern EU NUTS-2 regions performed generally worse.