Circular Economy ResearchPhD · Engineering · CambridgeUpdated — 2026
Under what conditions do circular strategies actually reduce environmental impacts?
Recycling and reuse are widely assumed to help the environment. In reality, it depends — and the standard ways of measuring circularity can't tell the difference. My current research builds a loss-first framework — a taxonomy of how materials, value and quality are lost in circular systems — to establish when circular strategies are viable and sustainable, and when alternative approaches yield better outcomes.
Current Active Research
Status
R-01
Active
A loss-first taxonomy of circularity losses
The mechanisms by which circular systems lose materials, value and quality — and indicators understood as projections of those losses.
R-02
Active
Carbon–circularity accounting via environmental depreciation
How cumulative environmental impacts should be accounted against circularity, through an environmental-depreciation framework.
R-03
Active
Circularity boundaries: a material-selection chart
Charting the boundaries of beneficial circularity.
R-04
Active
Battery recycling & critical minerals
Identifying what is lost with battery recycling, assessing claims about security of critical minerals.
Approach
Industrial ecology
Treating industry as a metabolism — tracing material and energy flows between processes.
Industrial symbiosis
Studying how industries exchange byproducts, energy and infrastructure — from Icelandic clusters to GreenLab's eco-industrial park.
Techno-economic analysis
Costing circular pathways against linear ones under real technical constraints.
Loss-first frameworks
Building taxonomies and accounting frameworks for how circular systems lose materials, value and quality.
Selected publications
From variance to value: stabilizing circular exchanges in industrial symbiosis networks
How to understand variable byproduct flows and stabilize them, so that industrial-symbiosis exchanges hold together — conducted with the support of Yale and GreenLab Skive.
Journal of Industrial Ecology · doi:10.1111/jiec.70122
Are larger carbon footprints linked to higher life satisfaction? A study of the Nordic countries
Testing whether larger carbon footprints actually buy higher life satisfaction across the Nordic countries — with the Sustainable Environments Lab at the University of Iceland.
Journal of Cleaner Production · doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2025.146602
You're concerned about climate change. Do your choices make an impact?
A public write-up for the Yale Environment Review on why willingness and resources don't automatically shrink a carbon footprint.
Yale Environment Review →
The climate-concern elasticity of carbon footprints
Does caring about the climate translate into a smaller footprint? A new way of measuring the link between climate concern and the emissions people actually cause — with the Sustainable Environments Lab at the University of Iceland.
Environmental Research Communications · doi:10.1088/2515-7620/acda80
In preparation: a paper on entrepreneurship-driven industrial symbiosis in Iceland, and a paper on the link between wellbeing and sustainable living. Full record: Google Scholar and ORCID
Affiliations & collaborations
Present
University of Cambridge — Engineering · King's College
Co-lead
Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association
Industry
GreenLab (DK) · Iceland Ocean Cluster
External research
University of Iceland — Sustainable Environments Lab
Interested in collaborating, or want the full picture? See my CV or get in touch.