Circular economy, Italia leader but not enough: imports cost 600 billion

Among the most critical materials, the report highlights in the section prepared by Enea, is phosphorus, an essential component of fertilisers and animal feed. Here Europe's dependence on imports is 82%. The main EU suppliers are Morocco (27%), Russia (24%), Algeria (10%) and Israel (7%): four countries with which geopolitical relations are anything but easy. The study points to sewage sludge as an underused source of recovery of this strategic element.

Even more critical is the foreign dependence for magnesium: China controls 88% of world production and EU dependence is total for primary magnesium. The report analyses the potential of circular desalination: the brine produced by the plants - traditionally considered a problematic waste - contains elements such as magnesium, potassium, calcium and bromine with a theoretical market value of more than 200 euros per cubic metre.

On the water front, around 30% of Europe's territory is subject to seasonal water scarcity each year, with peaks of more than 70% in southern Europe during the summer months. The European Commission's Water Resilience Strategy aims to reduce water consumption by 10% by 2030. For Italia, adapting large purification plants to the new standards will require investments estimated at between EUR 800 million and EUR 2 billion.

"The current geopolitical crisis has highlighted the vulnerability of our production system, which is 46.6% dependent on the import of raw materials," explained Claudia Brunori, director of ENEA's Sustainability Department. "Even though our country has developed a great capacity for recycling and productivity of raw materials, a paradigm shift based on the exploitation of our urban mines and the efficient use of resources along the value chain, starting from the design and production phases, is more necessary than ever. In this context, ENEA is strongly committed to the development and transfer of advanced technological solutions that can give a decisive acceleration towards circularity; however, in order to generate a systemic and lasting effect, adequate regulatory and financial instruments are also needed'.

Lastly, the report points out a worrying contradiction: just as the geopolitical context makes it urgent to accelerate circularity, private investment in Italia in activities typical of the circular economy (recycling, reuse, repair, rental, leasing) has dropped from €13.1 billion in 2019 to €10.2 billion in 2023 (from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP). A negative trend shared almost all over Europe.

On the NRP front, with more than 1,100 projects financed for waste management plants and recycling supply chains, spending remains low - around 17% as of October 2025 - with deadlines to 2026 increasingly at risk. On an industrial level, the Transition 5.0 programme has shown, according to the report, "strong limits in terms of consistency and effectiveness", highlighting the need to permanently integrate circularity into national industrial strategies.

Employment in a number of typical activities more directly related to the circular economy accounts for 508,000 people (2% of the total, in line with the EU average), but down 7% compared to 2019. This is a sign that the Italian circular economy, while excellent in environmental performance, has not yet found a robust economic growth model.

"Circularity is an issue of strategic autonomy and companies are well aware of it," confirms Lara Ponti, Confindustria Vice President for Environmental Transition and ESG Goals, who emphasises: "We must now move from the technical dimension to a sustainable industrial policy dimension. The circular economy is a cutting-edge industrial frontier, so it needs to experiment and make mistakes in order to keep improving, and this is not possible with the current timeframe and bureaucratic constraints. The resourcefulness and good ideas we have must be put into a system: to do this, we need a clear regulatory framework and an equally clear implementation capacity, which will allow us to maintain our technical leadership and turn it into an industrial policy'.