Circularity Gap Reporting Tool
The Circularity Gap Reporting Tool measures what share of the materials flowing through a business or economy come from reused, recycled or renewable sources versus virgin extraction, then shows the gap to close.
Boxes connect in a chain, starting with today's material flows and ending at the priority list for closing the gap.
Reach for this when…
- Your sustainability claims are vague and someone is about to ask for the number behind them.
- You want to compare circularity year on year, not just list initiatives.
- Regulators or a big customer are asking for a measured circularity position, not a policy statement.
How to run it
- Map every material and product flowing in and out of the business over a year.
- Classify each flow: virgin input, reused, recycled, renewable, or lost as waste.
- Calculate the circularity rate: circular flow divided by total flow.
- Compare against a sector benchmark or your own prior year to find the gap.
- Prioritise interventions on the largest flows first, not the easiest wins.
A worked example
Situation. Aline Uwase ran Kivu Highland Coffee Cooperative, a wet-mill cooperative in the Kivu hills of Rwanda, that composted cherry pulp and let parchment husks pile up behind the mill without ever putting a number on how much material actually left the site as waste.
Applied. Running the material flow count for one harvest season showed that two thirds of the biomass by weight left the gate as waste, against a sector benchmark nearer one third.
Result. She set up a briquette operation turning husks into cooking fuel sold locally, closing most of the gap in a year and creating a new income line from what had been a disposal cost.
The catch
The measurement is only as good as the data behind it, and most businesses do not track material flows well enough to trust the first number. Comparing circularity rates across sectors is close to meaningless - a coffee processor and a bank have nothing useful to compare. Use it to track your own trend, not to rank yourself against others.
A circularity rate with no benchmark attached is a number looking for a headline.
Origin: Circle Economy (Circularity Gap Report methodology, adapted here for a single business rather than a national economy)