More than 14.4 billion euros are the savings already obtained in Italy at the end of 2021, thanks to the effective adoption of managerial practices of the circular economy, which have allowed to use fewer resources and to extend the useful life cycle of the products in the seven macro-sectors that have been subject to investigation. However, the figure represents only about 14% of what could be saved by 2030 if the circular economy were applied in its entirety, that is to say more than 103 billion euros per year, to which must be added the emissions abated. This is reported in the Circular Economy Report 2022 of the School of Management of the Polytechnic University of Milan. The share of companies interviewed by the Observatory exceeded half for the first time (57%, it was 44% in 2021). The companies interviewed have adopted at least one circular economy practice, including the entire textile and food & beverage sectors (80% or more); instead, the threshold of the die-hard ones falls to 27%. In addition, the percentage of companies that have invested significantly in this new paradigm, compared to their size, has risen to 61%; in more than half of the cases the estimated return times are less than or equal to 2 years: this is a gamble that today has the contribution of the banking-financial system, whose interest in the circular economy has grown in the last year to the point of making available over 30 billion euros of loans to support the transition.
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