This world is facing a serious challenge in ensuring sustainability, while the rapid deterioration of environmental quality is affecting human being’s health and the ominous sign of climate change is threatening the survivability of this planet. Causes for this alarming trend are many, of which the critical ones remain to be over-exploitation of natural resources, excessive wastage of materials, energy and water, and fast accumulation of undesirable pollutants in the environment that we live in. In an effort of combating the adverse phenomena mentioned above, worldwide governments, industries, and communities have engaged a series of strategies and taken necessary actions to resolve the source problems and mitigate the associated impacts. The strategies include: pollution abatement, resource recycling, cleaner production, eco-industrial networking, sustainable materials management, sustainable production and consumption, climate change adaptation and mitigation, resilience capacity building, etc. In general, to address the local or specific issues, 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 regional or industrial sustainability, 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 zero waste or circular economy, tailored to address, respectively, boundary-specific or material-specific subjects, and come up with a viable economic system that maximizes the total value of derived products and services while minimizing its total impact to the environment. This paper will describe the fundamental elements and factors of consideration in developing a zero-waste system versus a circular economy system. Potential barriers and resolution strategies will be discussed. Case studies will be presented with focus on the process of system development, implementation, multi-stakeholder consultation, barrier resolution, performance assessment, status and future perspectives, etc. Factors of success and/or failure will be reviewed and lessons learned will be shared, to provide a reference for others who are engaged in or planning similar missions.
