Circular Economy in the Czech Republic: A Case Study of Waste Management

The aim of this thesis is to examine how the municipal waste recycling rate in the Czech Republic has changed, particularly after 2020, and which policies and factors contributed to this development. The concept of the circular economy is defined through its main objective—minimising the generation of unrecovered waste—and is situated within a broader environmental and economic context. The analytical section shows that the circularity rate in the European Union has been increasing very slowly despite adopted strategies and targets, and that the EU lacks an indicator for unrecovered waste generation per capita, which would capture the essence of circularity more accurately. At the same time, the Czech Republic’s strategic documents display a low level of target specification. The increase in the recycling rate in 2020 resulted from a long-term institutional framework, investments in infrastructure, regulatory incentives, strengthened extended producer responsibility schemes, and changes in waste composition during the COVID-19 pandemic. European and global factors played a mostly supplementary role.