Network approach to Circular Economy: heavy metals and plastic cycle accumulation analysis

In the last decade, Circular Economy has gained importance as a way to minimize emissions and consumption of raw materials. It is strongly based on sharing, reusing, repairing, and recycling. Indeed, it represents a key value for Sustainable Transition since our planet can count on finite resources and circularity implies that materials can undergo the same processes many times (e.g. production, disposal, triage). However, some harmful compounds may accumulate in the soil, in the hydrosphere, or even in human bodies during these cycles. In literature, this issue has never been developed with a complex network approach. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how this could be done. The main objectives are (i) to develop a simplified network model of a circular economy whose nodes represent production or consumption stages, (ii) to test if and where such harmful compounds accumulate at different nodes in the network and (iii) to check whether this accumulation is robust