From Waste to Market : Exploring Innovation Ecosystems for Waste Valorization, Markets and Institutions

This article explores the emergence of waste valorization innovations to investigate how they interact with incumbent waste management systems and what roles markets play in the process. We build upon innovation ecosystems as an analytical framework and investigate empirically three cases distributed across the waste hierarchy pyramid. We find that waste valorization initiatives are deeply entangled in incumbent waste management systems, and that markets alone are insufficient to drive innovations in waste valorization. Markets function better when resources already have some economic value, which is what waste valorization processes seek to obtain. When the environmental value is higher than the economic value, other mechanisms are needed to enable innovations, markets, and sustainability transitions. Support from the public sector in various capacities, from international regulation to demand-shaping, appears to be essential for circular economy transitions