Contribution of circular economy levels to sustainable development goals: Literature review based on natural language processing techniques

• Explores CE’s alignment with SDGs across micro, meso , and macro levels. • Investigates the role of CE in achieving sustainability through its three dimensions. • Reveals macro-level CE practices show 57.9 % alignment with SDGs, especially SDG8. • Identifies SDG8, SDG11, and SDG17 as most aligned with Circular Economy levels. • Utilizes NLP techniques to analyze semantic alignment between SDGs and CE levels. Nearly a decade after the establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Circular Economy (CE) action plan, the extent to which CE effectively drives sustainable development across its social, economic, and environmental dimensions remains unclear. This article explores the dynamic interaction between CE's micro, meso , and macro levels and the SDGs. It presents a visual framework to align traditional linear sustainability models with circularity while clarifying CE objectives and their connection to the 17 SDGs. The study employs a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze the semantic similarity between SDGs and CE levels. This approach systematically determines their alignment degree and the probability distribution of SDG coverage within each strategic CE level, highlighting the multi-faceted nature of SDGs. The results reveal the macro level demonstrates a more profound alignment, with an almost 57.9 % coverage of the SDGs, while the meso level has a high discursively relate with 49.5 %. Additionally, SDG8, SDG11 and SDG17 are recognized as the most aligned goals with CE levels, and SDG4 is classed as the least. This finding underscores the significant conversancy of macro-level initiatives, particularly in social dimension, towards SD, maps the most circular SDGs and clarifies the links between the dimensions of sustainability and CE and discursively relate of them. If offers insights for stakeholders, highlighting the need for a cohesive, multi-tiered CE strategy to support the SDGs. The study also calls for further research to develop metrics assessing CE’s impact on SDGs across different contexts.