Tropicalized Circular Economy: when development needs to speak Brazil’s language

*By Fernando Yuri, Senior Consultant for the Circular Economy pillar of the Ecological Transformation Plan at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, through Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV)

The circular economy has been consolidating itself as a development strategy that reorganizes how countries produce, consume, and manage their resources. In Brazil, it is moving to the center of economic, industrial, and environmental policy, especially in light of the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and longstanding socio-environmental inequalities. This transition does not occur automatically; it depends on institutional mechanisms capable of transforming principles into public policies, economic instruments, green job creation, and concrete action across territories.

In this context, the Ecological Transformation Plan (PTE), under the Ministry of Finance, and the National Circular Economy Strategy (ENEC), coordinated by the Ministry of Development, Industry, Trade and Services (MDIC), assume a structuring role. Together, they organize the circular economy as a State strategy, articulating economic, industrial, environmental, and social policy around a new development model oriented toward decarbonization, income generation, and the fulfillment of Brazil’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement.

The Ecological Transformation Plan – New Brazil represents a turning point in national economic policy by recognizing that the transition to a new economy requires financing, innovation, sustainable industrial policy, socio-industrial technologies, and integrated governance. By incorporating the circular economy as a strategic pillar, the PTE repositions the issue at the center of macroeconomic decision-making, connecting it to sustainable finance, low-carbon reindustrialization, productivity, and international competitiveness.

One of the distinguishing features of the PTE, as an economic-environmental plan, is the adoption of an Ecological Transformation Monitoring Panel with more than 200 actions, enabling the tracking of its implementation through indicators related to emissions reduction, mobilization of green investments, and productive innovation. This logic of monitoring, transparency, and results evaluation strengthens the State’s capacity to induce investments, adjust course when necessary, and ensure measurable economic, social, and environmental impacts.

Brazil’s circular economy aims to reorient the current national production model toward a sustainable, innovative, and regenerative economy, focused on waste reduction, expanding the economic value of natural resources, and increasing low-carbon productivity, promoting a development logic that integrates efficiency, inclusion, and competitiveness. By recognizing the socio-productive inclusion of waste pickers of reusable and recyclable materials as a structuring element of the transition, it affirms their role as essential agents of socio-environmental, economic, and territorial transformation. Its goals include the humane closure of open dumpsites, modernization of solid waste management systems, and the improvement of tax and economic instruments capable of inducing sustainable production practices and promoting ecosystem regeneration.

Among its guidelines are the promotion of public procurement of circular goods and services, the incorporation of circularity criteria into the Brazilian Sustainable Taxonomy, and the advancement of industrial circularity, maximizing the value of materials, goods, and services, including remanufacturing and reuse, encouraging eco-efficiency and waste prevention, as well as strengthening the scientific, technological, and innovation base by articulating science, technology, finance, and sustainable industrial policies.

The National Circular Economy Strategy (ENEC) and the Ecological Transformation Plan (PTE) provide economic scale and macro-strategic coherence, as well as regional development, and together build national circularity. These initiatives articulate principles, guidelines, and mechanisms capable of aligning public policies, investments, and territorial actions, connecting circular economy, bioeconomy, and socio-productive inclusion to the country’s diverse realities, promoting convergence among the federal government, states, municipalities, the productive sector, and civil society.

From ENEC, circularity unfolds into the National Circular Economy Plan (PLANEC), structured around five pillars, with particular emphasis on fiscal, tax, financial, and credit instruments. This framework enables alignment between climate ambition, green industrial policy, and socio-productive inclusion, guiding circularity toward concrete outcomes such as decarbonization, innovation, increased green productivity, and income generation.

Even so, Brazil’s main challenge remains: the circular economy cannot simply be imported from global models. Brazil is a tropical, biodiverse, and unequal country. The uncritical application of external solutions tends to produce a technocratic and exclusionary form of circularity.

At this point, bioeconomy becomes central to the tropicalization of Brazil’s circular economy. In a country that holds the world’s greatest biodiversity and is one of the largest agricultural powers, the biological cycle of circularity must incorporate socio-biodiversity assets and regenerative production systems as the foundation for decarbonization, income generation, and the creation of green jobs across territories.

Bioeconomy gives territorial substance to circularity. Value chains based on biomass, organic waste, non-timber forest products, agroecology, bio-inputs, and biomaterials enable the integration of environmental regeneration, productive innovation, social and industrial technologies, and local development. In this way, tropical circularity asserts itself as a strategy for regenerating ecosystems, economies, and sustainable work opportunities.

Integrating these themes requires an approach adapted to Brazil’s reality — that is, a tropicalized and distinctly Brazilian circular economy built upon seven structuring links: industrial, creative, human-centered, fair, inclusive, ancestral, and solidarity-based. These elements translate circularity beyond technical dimensions, incorporating culture, labor, social justice, traditional knowledge, and technologies suited to national productive dynamics.

A tropicalized circular economy is not an accessory path, but a strategic choice for Brazil’s future. By integrating it into economic policy, the country recognizes that development, socio-environmental justice, and competitiveness advance together. The Ecological Transformation Plan and the National Circular Economy Strategy are the instruments of this shift. What is at stake now is not the idea itself, but its implementation. The challenge is to ensure it reaches territories, guides structuring decisions, and delivers concrete results for Brazilian society.

*Fernando Yuri, MSc, has experience in circular economy, solid waste management, bioeconomy, and sustainability. He currently serves as Senior Consultant for the Circular Economy pillar of the Ecological Transformation Plan at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, through Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV). He is the founder of CicloBlue Circular Management and Solutions, a board member of the Regional Council of Chemistry, and Coordinator of its Technical Chamber on the Environment, as well as a member of the Goiás State Environmental Council (CEMAm). Instagram | Linkedin

*This text was automatically translated with the help of artificial intelligence and reviewed. Still, there may be slight differences compared to the original version in Portuguese.