BackgroundWhether place-based circular-economy policy can strengthen urban ecological resilience remains an open question in environmental economics. China’s Zero-Waste City (ZWC) pilot, covering 11 cities and 5 special zones in 2019 and expanded to 113 prefectures in 2022, provides the largest such policy experiment to date, and a natural setting in which to test this question.MethodsUsing a panel of 296 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2010 to 2023, we exploit the two-wave staggered rollou