OPINION – Seeing differently: How circular economy aligns with Macau’s next phase

Macau Business magazine l January 2026 |

In late 2025, a series of circular economy activities supported by the Macau Foundation brought together students, educators, practitioners, and members of the wider community to explore how sustainability and innovation might contribute to Macau’s long-term development. Delivered through distinct but complementary programmes, the activities converged around a shared public question: how a compact, resource-constrained city can rethink value, materials, and systems in ways that support diversification, resilience, and experimentation.

The programme unfolded across three interconnected formats — a public forum, innovation-focused site visits, and an experiential coastal walk. Together, these activities highlighted an important shift: circular economy is not simply an environmental topic, but a strategic lens through which cities can approach development, capability building, and future readiness.

Circular Economy as Strategy

The opening forum set the conceptual foundation by reframing circular economy beyond waste reduction or ESG compliance. Discussions focused on how circular thinking can support Macau’s broader development priorities — from innovation-driven growth and emerging industries to talent cultivation and cross-sector collaboration.

This perspective resonates strongly with the direction set out across multiple policy frameworks, including Macau’s Second Five-Year Plan, the Plan for Moderate Economic Diversification (2024–2028), the 2025 Policy Address, and the evolving development strategy for the Guangdong–Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin. Across these documents, a consistent emphasis emerges: innovation, sustainability, talent development, and stronger integration between research, industry, and society.

Rather than treating sustainability as a parallel agenda, circular economy offers Macau something more demanding — and more useful: a way to operationalise policy priorities by converting ambition into capability, and connecting environmental stewardship with economic logic through systems that can be tested, refined, and scaled.

The forum’s afternoon session broadened this conversation from frameworks to practice. Reflections by Dr Leanda Care introduced nature-based and permaculture-informed perspectives, highlighting the importance of care, ecology, and long-term stewardship in sustainability transitions. These were complemented by showcases from a range of initiatives, including student-led efforts such as iGEM UMAC, collaborations with Wuyi University, and local innovation ventures such as Chazence, AromaBase and BioMyne. Together, these contributions illustrated how circular economy thinking is already taking shape across education, research, and enterprise in Macau, reinforcing the idea that meaningful transition emerges through participation and experimentation across society.

From Vision to Rigour: Where Purpose Becomes Capability

If vision sets direction, rigour determines whether ideas can scale. A central theme emerging from the forum was the importance of measurement, lifecycle thinking, and technical credibility in moving beyond sustainability narratives toward durable impact.

This was most clearly articulated through discussions on life cycle assessment (LCA), including insights shared by Dr Fernando Dourado, whose work demonstrates how cradle-to-gate and cradle-to-cradle methodologies can inform real industrial decision-making. In Europe, such approaches have become foundational — not only for reporting, but for guiding design, material choice, and investment.

In many cities, sustainability is now highly visible but unevenly embedded — measured extensively, yet developed narrowly. Macau’s context reflects this dynamic in a distinctive way. Integrated resorts and large enterprises already engage with sophisticated ESG frameworks and reporting systems, often supported by external platforms and consultants. Yet this very demand creates an opening: not to expand reporting further, but to deepen local capability. Building analytical, scientific, and design-oriented capacities that allow sustainability challenges to be framed, tested, and solved within the city itself marks a critical shift — from outsourcing sustainability functions toward cultivating the foundations of a genuine innovation ecosystem.

This moment of growing capability also coincides with an important structural development in Macau’s financial landscape. With the passage of the new Investment Funds Law (Law 11/2025), Macau is entering a phase in which private capital, innovation, and long-term value creation can be more directly connected. By formally introducing private investment funds and increasing structural flexibility, the law creates new pathways for mission-oriented investment — including in areas such as circular materials, sustainability, and applied innovation. When aligned with clear societal missions, such financial infrastructure can support experimentation, scale-up, and durable impact.

Materials, Curiosity, and What Comes Next

The forum’s conceptual discussions were deliberately extended through practical, place-based learning activities. Innovation site visits introduced participants to early-stage circular practices in Macau, while an experiential walk from Lai Chi Vun to Coloane Village encouraged participants to observe materials, waste, and ecosystems through a different lens.

Beginning near a large-scale artwork constructed from reclaimed marine debris and ending along a shoreline scattered with oyster shells of varying textures and forms, the walk prompted a subtle but powerful shift: seeing discarded materials not as refuse, but as potential resources. Shell fragments, organic residues, and post-consumption materials became starting points for discussion on reuse, natural binders, and bio-based innovation — not as finished solutions, but as questions worth exploring.

These observations echoed insights from my own visits to Portugal’s circular research ecosystem. During visits to biotechnology and engineering laboratories at institutions such as the University of Minho and the Catholic University of Portugal, it became clear that bacterial cellulose — discussed at the forum by Prof. Miguel Gama — represents only one element within a much broader materials landscape. Across these institutions, research increasingly focuses on designing materials with their entire lifecycle in mind, from agricultural by-products to fermentation-derived binders and bio-polymers.

What is striking in these environments is not scale or funding alone, but alignment — and how quickly ideas move once that alignment exists. Research agendas are shaped by real-world constraints; companies engage early; students move fluidly between laboratory, pilot, and application. Scientific rigour and societal relevance are not competing priorities, but mutually reinforcing ones. This integrated model offers a useful reference point for Macau — not as something to replicate wholesale, but as evidence that impact and excellence can, and should, advance together.

What unites these efforts is not a single technology, but a shared mindset: curiosity, systems thinking, and a willingness to experiment.

For Macau, nurturing this mindset — particularly among younger generations — may be just as important as any specific material innovation. Circular economy does not begin in laboratories alone. It begins with the ability to notice patterns, ask better questions, and imagine alternative uses for what already exists.

Seen through this lens, Macau’s scale becomes an advantage rather than a limitation. A compact city can test ideas quickly, learn deliberately, and adapt intelligently. When understood as both strategy and system, circular economy offers Macau not just a sustainability narrative, but a credible, future-facing economic logic. Macau does not lack ideas, ambition, or resources. What it needs now is alignment — between policy, capital, research, and experimentation — so that circular economy becomes not a theme we discuss, but a capability we build. The window for this alignment is open, but it will not remain so indefinitely.

Footnote:

This article is an output of Macau Foundation–supported activities, including the project “Sino–Portuguese Collaboration: Innovation from Food By-Products and Cultural Exchange for a Sustainable Future” and the Macau Institute for Corporate Social Responsibility in Greater China (MICSRGC)’s “All for 17,17 for All 2025 Macau SDGs Sustainable Development and Cultural Community Activities” initiative.