A circularity score is not a circularity claim.

A circularity percentage can look precise while answering a different question from the one you are asking. The same economy can hold several circularity figures at once, each produced by a credible body, each correct in its own method, and none interchangeable. That is the trap waiting for anyone who sets a circular target, reports progress, or builds an investment case on the strength of a single number.

The trap is easiest to see in the places that measure themselves most carefully, because there the competing numbers are all published and visible at once. Among those, the Netherlands is the clearest example. It is the frontrunner of the European Union on one official measure, a global frontrunner on another, and, on the measure that actually defines its national target, extremely unlikely to get there. All three are true at the same time. The country has not failed at measurement. It has run into a problem the whole field shares.

Three numbers, one country

Take the clearest example, the same country and the same year, across three respected sources:

These numbers are not in conflict because someone is wrong. They differ because they answer different questions, on different scopes, by different methods. Set any two side by side, or build a progress bar that reads “24.5% of the way to 50%,” and you invent a relationship that does not exist. The numbers do not sit on the same scale.

This is a decision problem, not a statistics problem

The fragmentation would not matter if it stayed in a methodology appendix. It does not. It moves straight into the decisions an organisation makes.

If a company uses one metric for reporting, another for target-setting, and a third for an investment claim, it can build a circular strategy that looks coherent on a slide and falls apart under scrutiny. Procurement compares suppliers on one basis. The sustainability team reports on another. Finance asks for a return against a target the metric was never built to track. Each function is using a real number. Together they do not add up.

That is how circularity becomes theatre: precise figures, weak claims, and no reliable decision logic underneath. A circularity number is not technical detail. It is a claim, and like any claim it is only as good as the question it answers.

Why the numbers differ

Three measurement approaches dominate this discussion, and each is built differently.

The Eurostat circular material use rate is a domestic material-flow indicator. It calculates the share of total material use in an economy that comes from recovered and recycled materials, using a method harmonised across all EU member states. It is published every year for all 27, which makes it the strongest EU-wide headline circularity indicator for cross-country comparison. Its scope is deliberately narrow: it captures recycled material cycled back into the economy, and little beyond that.

Circle Economy's Circularity Metric is closer to a consumption or societal-needs-based material-flow measure. Rather than counting recycling inside a country's borders, it looks at the materials needed to meet a society's needs and counts secondary materials as circular, reflecting the global material footprint behind a country's consumption. It is broader, and in many ways closer to the material reality behind what a country consumes. But it is less useful as a clean annual league-table metric, because it is produced through individual commissioned reports in different years rather than one simultaneous dataset.

The Dutch national metric is different again. The 50% target is defined as an absolute reduction in primary abiotic raw material use, measured in kilotonnes against 2016, and tracked by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) using material flow data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). It is a “use half as much new material” target, not a “be 50% circular” target.

Even the global headline is unstable. The first Circularity Gap Report, launched in 2018, put the world at 9.1% circular. The 2024 edition reported a fall to 7.2% by 2023. The 2025 edition reported 6.9%. The 2026 edition shifts its main emphasis to a new Value Gap, estimated at around 25.4 trillion euro, close to 31% of global GDP. The single most cited number in the field is itself a moving target, revised as the method matures, and its own authors are steering attention towards a different measure.

The data that holds, and the data that does not

Some of these figures can carry comparison and some cannot.

The Eurostat rate can. It covers every EU state, every year, on one method. In 2024 the EU average was 12.2%, with the Netherlands highest at 32.7% and Romania lowest at 1.3%. That spread is real and the ranking is meaningful. It is the right tool for asking how one European country compares with another.

The Circularity Gap national scans should be used much more carefully for that purpose, despite the reports describing their method as internationally applicable. Only a limited set of countries and regions have commissioned one, in different years, with a method that has evolved between them. The fragility shows when a place is measured twice. The Quebec regional scan, first reported at 3.5%, was later recalculated to 2.5% under the original comparable method and 1.9% under an updated one. Same place, three numbers, depending only on method and year.

There is one cut of the data where circularity genuinely and reliably varies, and it is not by country but by material. In the EU in 2024 the circular material use rate was 23.4% for metal ores, 14.3% for non-metallic minerals, 9.9% for biomass, and 3.8% for fossil energy materials. The pattern has a clean physical explanation: metals are generally more technically and economically viable to recycle and feed back into the economy, while fossil materials are mostly burned, leaving little material available to cycle back. This is the dimension on which “what is circular and what is not” can be stated honestly with numbers.

The frontrunner, looked at squarely

The Netherlands earns its reputation. It has a national circular economy programme, explicit 2030 and 2050 goals, and one of the most detailed material and waste accounting systems in the EU, with PBL and CBS producing a regular Integral Circular Economy Report that breaks the transition down by material, product group and sector. That depth is exactly why it is the best place to see the limits of any single score.

The caution sits inside the detail. Part of the recent rise in the EU rate can be explained mechanically rather than by better recycling: when domestic material consumption falls, the recycled share can rise even without more material being cycled back. In the Netherlands, PBL's assessment is blunt. It is extremely unlikely that the 2030 halving of primary abiotic material use will be reached, and primary abiotic resource use was higher in 2022 than in 2020. The Dutch resource footprint still ran to roughly 561 megatonnes in 2022, about 87 kilograms of raw material per person per day.

So the frontrunner, looked at squarely, leads its peers on the comparable European measure, sits well below that figure on the broader consumption measure, and is off track against the reduction target it set itself. None of those statements can be dropped without distorting the picture. And none of this is unique to the Netherlands. The gap between the EU and Circle Economy numbers exists for other countries too, and the global figure shifts with each edition. The Dutch case is simply the clearest, because the Dutch measure more.

What to do with this

The point is not to distrust circularity measurement. The Eurostat rate is a sound comparative indicator, the Circularity Gap reports add real depth on the countries that have them, and the Dutch monitoring is among the best anywhere. The damage is done only when the measures are mixed, when a number from one method is set against a target from another, or when one percentage is asked to summarise something it was never built to capture.

Three practices keep the work honest:

1. Name the metric every time a number appears. “32.7% on the Eurostat circular material use rate” carries information that “32.7% circular” does not.
2. Use the Eurostat rate for comparison between countries, and national metrics for tracking national targets — never fuse the two into one progress figure.
3. Treat the global headline as directional, given that the method behind it has been revised more than once and its own authors are shifting emphasis.

Where Circular Intelligence works

Circular Intelligence works at the point where circular ambition has to become decision logic, and that starts with measurement. Before an organisation, a sector programme or a public body can set a credible circular target, it has to know which question it is actually answering. Reducing primary material use, increasing recycled input, lowering material footprint, extending product life, reducing supply risk and creating value from existing stocks are different goals. They need different indicators.

We help organisations connect those indicators to the decisions they actually need to make: target-setting, reporting, procurement, investment cases, programme design and claims. The goal is not one perfect circularity score. There is no such thing. The goal is a measurement system that holds together when finance, sustainability, operations and external stakeholders start asking different questions. Every target and claim should be backed by a number you can stand behind.

A circularity score, in the end, is not a circularity claim on its own. The figure is real, but it only means something once you say which measure you are using and which question it answers. Until the definitions converge, naming the metric, the method and the scope is not a disclaimer at the bottom of the page. It is the difference between a circular claim that survives scrutiny and one that does not.

References

• Circularity Gap Reporting Initiative, About.
• Circularity Gap Reporting Initiative, Methodology.
• Circularity Gap Reporting Initiative, National Circularity Gap Metric (country scans).
• Circle Economy, Circle Economy adapts methodology of global circularity metric for nation states (Circularity Gap Report Austria).
• Circle Economy, The Circularity Gap Report (nations, regions and cities), including the Netherlands at 24.5%.
• Renewable Matter, Circularity Gap Report 2026: the linear model wastes a third of global GDP.
• European Environment Agency, Circular material use rate in Europe (EU 12.2% in 2024).
• Eurostat, Circular material use rate dataset, codes cei_srm030 and env_ac_cur (all 27 member states, annual).
• PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Integral Circular Economy Report 2025, summary and main findings.
• PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Circular Economy (50% reduction by 2030; fully circular by 2050).
• Government of the Netherlands, Circular economy by 2050.
• Statistics Netherlands (CBS), Consumers in the Netherlands use 87 kilograms of raw materials per day.
• Statistics Netherlands (CBS), Decomposition of changes in primary abiotic resources in the Netherlands 1996 to 2022.
• IO+, Dutch circular economy needs bold action, says PBL report.

Note on figures: circularity rates from different sources are not directly comparable because they use different methods and scopes. Country and global figures should always be read with their source and year, and the global Circularity Gap Report series has been revised across editions as its methodology has developed.