Ecological Economics 200 (2022) 107538 Available online 6 July 2022 0921-8009/© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ANALYSIS Material governance and circularity policies: How waste policies and innovation affect household appliances’ accumulation Matteo Mazzarano * University of Siena, Department of Political and International Sciences, Via P.A. Mattioli 10, Siena 53100, Italy A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Material capital In-use stock Circular economy Innovation Waste policies Electrical and electronic equipment Environmental Kuznets Curve ABSTRACT This paper investigates the macro-economic drivers of accumulation and recycling of material capital from in-use Stock of a class of durable goods: Electrical and Electronic Equipment. This category is relevant for the European policy’s objectives for its content of critical raw materials and its relevance in the Digital Agenda. A theoretical model and empirical estimations over a EU27 + UK national panel are developed to understand the optimal dynamic of accumulation, innovation, and recycling. The former is growth models supporting a theory of stock accumulation and stock diversity. This framework is used to delineate possible biases of the empirical analysis, which is made throughout a panel data model estimation. The panel uses weight per capita and Shannon con- centration index as target variables to address the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Dummies proxied the Waste Packages of 2008 and 2012 to control for breaks. The results show the high signifcance of the panel data model within each Stratum of EU states. Waste policies are strongly correlated to increasing EEE material accumulation rather than a reduction ceteris paribus. Socio-economic variables are generally signifcant, with evidence of economic activity decoupling EEE stock. Lastly, the increase in average durability is positively correlated to material accumulation. 1. Introduction The Circular Economy is an umbrella defnition for the vision, policy framework, and business models that aim at avoiding waste generation and the use of virgin materials (Homrich et al., 2018). For the European Union (EU), it is a policy nexus for the transition to a more sustainable society. Circularity is linked to different issues: sustainable develop- ment, trade security, economic growth, and innovation. The environ- mental issues implicate the sustainability of the EU lifestyle: effcient use of resources in a fair society for a more equitable tomorrow. The stra- tegic issues are related to the protection of the EU industrial assets against an external pressure of political instability and trade disputes: to tackle the dependence of green and technological innovation to a set of strategic materials. Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) is a class of commodities that represents both policy issues and is relevant for the green transition. For the sustainability of the EU socio-economic system, such commodities synthesize most functions for human welfare in a limited set of physical objects. Therefore, keeping utility constant, electrifcation, and EEE accumulation reduces resource consumption (Pearson, 2013). The circularity of EEE is therefore necessary for the sustainability of EU Welfare. At this point, it is needed to cast a clear difference of what it is here defned as Circular Economy: it is an eco- nomic system where commodities that end their purpose by age and are due to discarding should be retroftted into a resource or a new product. This paper interprets circularity in an extensive manner, distancing its added value to the literature from the idea that secondary materials recovery should not be considered part of the Circular Economy (Mav- ropoulos and Nilsen, 2020). Conversely it represents the socio-economic system that is characterized by material fows, aiming at making it the most effcient as possible; that elaborates waste into resources as much as possible to upkeep the Stock of material capital, resulting in circu- larity of material fows (Zotti and Bigano, 2019). The in-use Stock of EEE is an example of material Stock that the Circular Economy helps main- tain through the recovery of its spent commodities and their secondary materials. The objectives of the European Union regarding the circularity of EEE could be summarized according to the waste policy package in 2017 (European Parliament and Council, 2017) and the communication on Abbreviations: Electrical and Electronic Equipment, EEE; European Union, EU; feasible generalized least squares, FGLS; Environmental Kuznets Curve, EKC. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: matteo.mazzarano@unisi.it. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107538 Received 5 September 2021; Received in revised form 25 March 2022; Accepted 27 June 2022