To combat the increasing climate change impact, governments, industries, and communities worldwide have engaged a wide spectrum of strategies and actions to decarbonize and minimize the greenhouse gas emissions. These strategies include: cleaner production, zero waste, circular economy, sustainable materials management, low-carbon production and consumption, resilience capacity building, etc. To address the local or specific issues, however, a combination of strategies would be selected by responsible bodies and applied to individual cases, depending on respective problem characteristics and affordability considerations. Above all, to achieve the objective of decarbonization, the responsible bodies must take an integrated approach to tackle the multi-stakeholder issues, ranging from technological, regulatory, environmental, to economic and market solutions. The overall solution approach, on the other hand, can take the form of total electrification, zero waste, circular economy, and sustainable materials management, tailored to address the region-specific issues, and come up with a viable economic system that maximizes the total benefit of decarbonization while minimizing its overall impact to the environment. This paper will describe means of decarbonization through sustainable materials management and circular economy. Its approach, methodology and implications will be examined with regard to greenhouse gas reductions and environmental conservation. Case studies will be reviewed with intention of illustrating a sound decarbonization planning taking a balanced and overall life-cycle approach.
