Circularity is the idea of keeping products and materials useful instead of discarding them unnecessarily. It begins with using less, maintaining what we have, reusing, repairing and recycling before treating something as waste.
Recycling, material recovery and thermal treatment should not be presented as mutually exclusive slogans. Their environmental relationship depends on the material, recovery quality, contamination, energy use and which pathway is genuinely displaced.
A waste system can recover material, recover energy, or sometimes do both. These outcomes preserve different forms of value and should not be combined into one generic claim of “recovery”.
Circular carbon concerns keeping carbon-containing materials in productive use and reducing unnecessary demand for new fossil carbon. It does not mean that every process recovering a carbon-containing output is automatically circular or climate-beneficial.