€25.4 trillion of value, lost every year.

The Value Gap · CGR 2026 headline

Six numbers that reframe the debate.

Where the €25.4 trillion actually leaks out.

The CGR 2026 breaks the Value Gap into five interlinked loss pathways. Two of them — end-of-life waste and energy losses — account for roughly three-quarters of the total. The consumption of fixed capital (buildings, infrastructure, machinery deteriorating before their useful life ends) adds another €5.2 trillion. These are not rounding errors: they are structural leaks in how the linear economy is designed.

The four mechanisms the CGR 2026 identifies as driving value loss across all five pathways.

The material story underneath the numbers.

The Value Gap is a new lens, but the physical economy it measures is the one Circle Economy has been tracking since 2018. Extraction is still climbing, the share of secondary materials in the input mix is still falling, and six of nine planetary boundaries remain crossed. The charts below show the material story that the CGR 2026 sits on top of.

The circularity metric is going the wrong way.

Since Circle Economy started measuring it in 2018, the share of secondary materials feeding the global economy has fallen every year. Not because we recycle less — because virgin extraction is growing faster than recycling can keep up.

Extraction tripled in fifty years. It’s not slowing.

Global material extraction climbed from around 30 billion tonnes in 1970 to more than 106 billion tonnes in 2023. On business-as-usual, the UN International Resource Panel projects a further 60% rise by 2060 — a scale of throughput no combination of recycling can absorb.

Where the 106 billion tonnes go.

Of every tonne of material flowing into the global economy in 2021, just 69 kilograms came from a recycled source. Nearly two-fifths ended up locked into new buildings, roads and infrastructure, and roughly one-third was burned or dumped without recovery.

The 6× gap in who’s consuming what.

High-income countries house less than a fifth of the world’s people but consume more than half its materials. A person in a high-income country has a material footprint six times that of someone in a low-income country — and three times what the UN considers a sustainable level.

Six of nine planetary boundaries have been crossed.

The 2023 update of the planetary-boundaries framework confirmed that humanity is operating outside the safe space on six of the nine Earth-system processes that keep the planet habitable. Material extraction and use drive around two-thirds of greenhouse-gas emissions and more than 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress.

Source: Richardson et al. 2023, Planetary Boundaries update; cited in Circularity Gap Report 2026.

Where continental data exists — four of nine boundaries.

Only four planetary boundaries can honestly be broken down by continent: land-system change, freshwater use, and the two biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus). The other five — climate, ozone, aerosols, ocean acidification, novel entities — are global system properties that don’t have per-continent thresholds.

Sources: Steffen et al. 2015 regional analysis; FAO Global Forest Resources 2020; WRI Aqueduct 4.0; Bouwman et al. / EDGAR nutrient databases. Continent bins are indicative — sub-regional variation is large.

Who is driving the overshoot — per person, per year.

Planetary boundaries are crossed by pressure, not by population alone. These are the four pressures with the clearest link to boundaries: CO₂ emissions (climate), material footprint (multiple), nitrogen fertiliser use (biogeochemical), and freshwater withdrawal. Values are per capita and continental averages hide big country-level differences.

Sources: Global Carbon Budget 2023; UNEP IRP Global Material Flows Database; FAO / IFA fertiliser statistics; FAO AQUASTAT. Safe per-capita shares are equal-share allocations of published global budgets and are contested — they show scale of the gap, not policy.

The economy in one diagram: 106 in, 65 out.

Circle Economy’s headline figure hides a deeper story: the global economy takes in 106.1 billion tonnes of processed materials each year, and only 65.7 billion tonnes flow back out — the remainder accumulates as new buildings, roads and machines. Barely 7 Gt of that output is actually recycled.

The same planet, wildly different footprints.

The 12.2-tonne global average masks a per-capita spread of more than 10× between regions. Australia and North America now consume close to — or more than — three times what the UN considers a sustainable material footprint. Africa consumes less than half of it.

The 34 materials no one can afford to lose.

The Circularity Gap Report highlights that the energy and digital transitions will be metals-intensive — and the EU has already flagged 34 raw materials as critical, of which 17 are also strategic. Whether their value survives end-of-life is mostly settled at the design stage, long before anything reaches a recycler.

What the report actually asks for.

Circle Economy’s central argument is that recycling alone cannot close the gap — the level of throughput is the problem. The report calls for three shifts, in order of impact:

The report also flags an under-reported upside: if every material currently landfilled that could be cycled were actually recovered, the global Circularity Metric would rise from 6.9% to around 25% — a near-fourfold jump without changing the level of extraction.

Note on figures: all quantitative values on this page are drawn from the Circularity Gap Report 2026 (Circle Economy, in collaboration with Deloitte). The report’s data year is 2021 for material-flow indicators; extraction totals through 2023 draw on UNEP’s Global Resources Outlook. Where projections appear, they follow the UN IRP’s baseline trajectory.