Legal Landscape of Circular Supply Chains
Circular Supply Chains – identifying and allocating legal risks (CirCus)
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A transition to a circular economy has become an important policy goal. CirCus analyses the extent to which the concept of circularity affects the legal distribution of risks in the supply chains and whether circular supply chains call for new liability standards and new collaborative contract models. |
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Liability standards and contracts are fundamental building blocks for the distribution of risks in supply chains. However, current liability and contract law reflect in their most basic principles not a circular, but a linear reality. In a circular contract law, courts will be challenged when applying basic quality and product safety concepts as ‘fitness for purpose’ and ‘legitimate expectations’ because of the multipurpose nature of the products on the market. Finally, the idea of the circular supply chain challenges the most basic understanding in contract and liability law of clearly separated risks spheres between the parties as long term collaboration and transparency between the parties will increasingly become necessary in order to understand the needs of the entire chain. CirCus focuses on the described challenges in three case studies.
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Researchers
| Name | Title | |
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| Andhov, Marta | Associate Professor |
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| Gausdal, Maria Edith Lindholm | Assistant Professor |
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| Hansen, Ole | Professor |
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| Ritchie, Hamish George | Postdoc |
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| Steenmans, Katrien | Postdoc |
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| Ulfbeck, Vibe Garf | Head of Centre, Professor |
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| Usynin, Maxim | Assistant Professor - Tenure Track |
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Projects
This postdoc project is part of the Circular Supply Chains – identifying and allocating legal risks (CirCus) project, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Within the context of the waste and resource crises, there are increasing calls to transition to a circular economy, in which wastes are prevented or, where not possible, waste and resources are reused, recycled, and recovered for the purpose of sustainable development. Many mechanisms exist in law to promote circular economies. This postdoc focuses on one such mechanism: extended producer responsibility, where the producer of a product is responsible for it throughout its life-cycle. The overarching aim of the postdoc is to investigate the legal risks of adopting producer responsibility (including through ownership) and liability within private law and waste law to promote circular economies within the EU context. For this purpose, this research will: (1) assess the current legal risks context of producer responsibility and liability; (2) identify the impact of identified legal risks in relation to circular economy transitions and implementations; and (3) propose recommendations for the use of producer responsibility and liability to stimulate moves towards a circular economy. This project adopts a three-step user-centric, co-productive process to ensure usefulness of any insights to relevant stakeholders: a desk-based scoping review to map legal risks, a survey to triangulate, validate, and expand on the scoping review, and semi-structured interviews to provide insights on the risks and recommendations.
This project aims to establish ongoing collaborative research between the Universities of Edinburgh and Copenhagen on the regulatory transition to a circular economy. In particular, this project examines: How may a legal framework for circular economy need to differ from existing regulatory frameworks on waste? Is a change in emphasis or substantive transformation of legal tools and techniques needed? This will be achieved through two aims: first, the project will analyse Danish and Scottish case studies (textile, plastics, satellites) to identify existing legal tools for facilitating circular economies. Second, the project will develop a comparative legal approach to review, compare, and contrast the appropriateness and effectiveness of circular economy regulation in Denmark and Scotland. The two countries have similarities (strong commitment to sustainability, population size, level of development, reliance on technological expertise and the rule of experts) and variations (EU/non-EU, implementation of distinct recyclability targets) that make them rich sites for interpretive analysis and meaningful comparison.
As part of this project, there is currently a call for papers to contribute to a Symposium Collection for publication in Transnational Environmental Law on ‘Transitioning to Circular Economies in a Transnational Legal Order’. The deadline for submission of a paper draft to be included in the collection is on 13 January 2025 to the Symposium Convenors (Dr Feja Lesniewska, Dr Michael Picard and Dr Katrien Steenmans), with the submission deadline of papers for peer review on 12 May 2025. Please find the Call for Papers here with further details.
This project is funded by the Edinburgh-Copenhagen Strategic Partnership Seed Fund awarded to Dr Michael Picard at Edinburgh Law School, The University of Edinburgh, and Dr Katrien Steenmans, CEPRI. Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen.
As part of this project, a two-day workshop was organised at UCL, London, UK, by Dr Allison Lindner (UCL) and Dr Katrien Steenmans on 4-5 July 2023. This workshop explored the role of law in preventing waste generation and incentivising the reuse, recycling and recovery of any produced waste. The workshop was structured around one-hour sessions allocated to each participant, who received detailed feedback on pre-submitted and pre-read papers. For each paper, (1) the author briefly described the contribution of their paper and identified particular areas on which feedback was sought (2 minutes), (2) a first discussant described their understanding of the paper’s central argument(s) and contribution(s), and offered constructive feedback (12 minutes), (3) a second discussant added additional comments, and (4) there was a group discussion on the paper (with opportunity for the author to respond) (30 minutes). This is based on the Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law & Policy Approach to Presenting and Offering Feedback at Writing Workshops.
The particular focus was primarily on engaging early career researchers, whose opportunities for in-person networking were severely reduced due to pandemic lockdowns and in some cases the precarity of short-term academic contracts, and to solidify and develop the Waste Law Reading Group.
The workshop programme is available here.
Currently work is undergoing on a Special Issue on waste law for Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law, guest edited by Dr Allison Lindner, Prof Rosalind Malcolm (University of Surrey), Prof Eloise Scotford (UCL), and Dr Katrien Steenmans.
This project is funded by a UCL VDI Leadership Fund.
Globalised supply chains are a defining feature of contemporary commerce. However, lengthy and diffuse supply chains, often spanning multiple continents, raise significant ethical, environmental, and geopolitical concerns. Whilst high-profile scandals within commercial supply chains have been documented for decades, substantial barriers remain to applying doctrinal legal structures in ways that effectively address these concerns and achieve public policy objectives. In this context, the transition to a circular economy - by reducing waste and keeping materials in circulation for longer - has the potential to mitigate some of these challenges. At the same time, the pursuit of a meaningfully circular economy requires a fundamental transformation of existing linear economic structures. This transition may reframe, compound, or exacerbate existing concerns, whilst also generating new externalities or issues. Against this backdrop, Hamish Ritchie explores the interaction between regulation, contract law, and the pursuit of fundamental policy goals in global circular supply chains. He does so by examining key globalised markets and sectors, such as battery production; key regulatory instruments aimed at shaping global supply chains, including the European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation; and core doctrinal issues, such as the translation of regulatory norms into supply chains and obligations to contract.
Public procurement, the processes by which public authorities purchase works, goods, or services, can support transitions to circular economies. With its potential to foster the circular economy, various guidance documents, best practices, recommendations, frameworks, and other similarly intentioned (but labelled differently) documents have been developed both within academic scholarship and by practitioners to support circular public procurement. This is only expected to gain further prominence within the EU as a result of the move towards mandatory sustainability requirements in public procurement. In this project, Katrien Steenmans and Federica Muscaritoli scope the extant literature to provide a coherent evidence base of circular procurement practices; this research synthesises and investigates these to inform the opportunities and gaps in EU environmental and public procurement law.
Contact
PI Director of centre, professor
Vibe Garf Ulfbeck
Faculty of Law
University of Copenhagen
South Campus, Building: 6B.3.64
Karen Blixens Plads 16
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
Phone: (45) 35 32 31 48
E-mail: Vibe.Ulfbeck@jur.ku.dk