Mapping risks and opportunities of circular economy adoption in the aerospace sector

The aerospace sector is facing mounting sustainability challenges due to mounting environmental constraints, critical raw material dependencies, and geopolitical supply risks. The Circular Economy (CE) has emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance resource efficiency, extend product life cycles, and strengthen supply chain resilience. However, despite its potential, CE adoption in aerospace remains emergent and is struggling to take off, hampering by a lack of clear understanding of risks and opportunities that shape its adoption. This study provides a comprehensive and structured review of the extant academic literature on the risks and opportunities associated with CE adoption in the aerospace sector. Utilising a dual approach of bibliometric and critical analysis, this research delineates 178 peer-reviewed publications from 1964 to 2025, elucidating intellectual structures, thematic clusters, and emergent research trajectories. The bibliometric analysis reveals a fragmented and multidisciplinary knowledge base, dominated by technological and environmental perspectives, with growing attention to digitalisation, life-extension strategies, and space-related circularity. The critical review highlights both the strategic opportunities offered by CE practices, such as enhanced resource security, supply chain resilience, and innovation, and the key risks arising from technological uncertainty, regulatory complexity, certification constraints, and market instability. The findings indicate a persistent underrepresentation of organisational, governance, and social dimensions in the extant literature, alongside a predominance of cross-sectional and context-specific empirical studies. The present paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by consolidating existing evidence, identifying structural research gaps, and proposing a future research agenda to support the effective adoption of CE within the aerospace sector.