Europe’s economy has generated unprecedented wealth over the past century. Part of the success is attributable to continuous improvements in resource productivity—a trend that has started to reduce Europe’s resource exposure. At the same time, resource productivity remains hugely underexploited as a source of wealth, competitiveness, and renewal. Our new study, Growth within: A circular economy vision for a competitive Europe,1 provides new evidence that a circular economy, enabled by the technology revolution, would allow Europe to grow resource productivity by up to 3 percent annually. This would generate a primary-resource benefit of as much as €0.6 trillion per year by 2030 to Europe’s economies. In addition, it would generate €1.2 trillion in nonresource and externality benefits, bringing the annual total benefits to around €1.8 trillion compared with today.
