Challenges in supply chain redesign for the Circular Economy: a literature review and a multiple case study

By Gianmarco Bressanelli, Marco Perona, Nicola Saccani. International Journal of Production Research, 2018

487 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite companies face several challenges when redesigning their supply chain for the Circular Economy, the literature lacks a systematisation of such challenges and of the ways to overcome them. Through a systematic literature review, this paper identifies and systematises 24 challenges that may hamper a supply chain redesign for the Circular Economy. Sixteen among these challenges are well known from research in related topics. On the contrary, the remaining eight are relatively new or take a different relevance within the Circular Economy context. A multiple case study in the household appliance supply chain is carried out, to explore how these challenges appear in practice and how companies may tackle them. The cases analysed involve actors at different supply chain levels, and findings suggest that a great degree of vertical integration by one actor in the supply chain is not a necessary condition for Circular Economy implementation. The empirical study, in conjunction with the literature analysis, leads to the development of a framework linking the challenges to specific levers that companies may pursue to overcome them. The framework can be seen as a reference for managers undertaking the path towards Circular Economy.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5483c51dae0b1df864ecb7690f8cc7615710c37f

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Citations in the corpus

Investigation of circular economy practices in the context of emerging economies: a CoCoSo approach (2021, background): “Brown and Bajada (2018) argued that current methods for presenting material flows at the level of the company, system, and economy are insufficient to establish enlightening performance and productivity indicators for the Circular Supply Network (CSN).”
Targets for a circular economy (2020, background): “The same instruments can promote improvements in organisation, engineering, supply-chain, and business processes, which can reduce costs (Bressanelli et al., 2018).”
Learning from Failure and Success: The Challenges for Circular Economy Implementation in SMEs in an Emerging Economy (2021, background): “, government), including barriers such as lack of transparency and information sharing among partners [93].”
Identifying the Equilibrium Point between Sustainability Goals and Circular Economy Practices in an Industry 4.0 Manufacturing Context Using Eco-Design (2019, background): “In a circular economy, materials are constantly circulating in many different supply chains and never have to become waste (Bressanelli et al. 2018).”