Sustainability and circular economy: a proposal for integration of circularity requirements in a sustainability report

Sustainable development is an integral part of the strategy of companies seeking to maintain or conquer markets. Companies prepare sustainability reports using requirements recognized by the market. Another established trend is the concept of Circular Economy (CE). In spite of the fact that circularity and sustainability have been addressed independently as two isolated areas, recent researches pointed out an opportunity to seize synergies from their intersection. This article presents a proposal for integrating CE items into a sustainability report model. A sustainability report model was selected in the literature and the CE items not covered in this report were identified and, through a survey research, the relevance of these items was validated. The contribution of this article is in the identification of the eighteen items of CE not covered in the GRI sustainability report model, in the validation of the relevance and structuring of these items according to the GRI standards and their subsequent insertion in the model. In this way, the unprecedented nature of the research is evident, since there is no report model on the market that deals simultaneously with sustainability and the CE, generating new knowledge about the intersection of these two research areas.