Towards a more Circular Economy: Proposing a framework linking sustainable public procurement and sustainable business models

By S. Witjes, R. Lozano. 2016

586 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Sustainability aims at addressing environmental and socio-economic issues in the long term. In general, the literature on sustainability has focused mainly on the environmental issues, whereas, more recently, a Circular Economy has been proposed as one of the latest concepts for addressing both the environmental and socio-economic issues. A Circular Economy aims at transforming waste into resources and on bridging production and consumption activities; however, there is still limited research focusing on these aspects. This paper addresses the link between procurement and supply practices, and proposes changing from a traditional public procurement process, based on product-selling business models, to a more service-oriented system. The paper proposes a framework to include technical and non-technical specifications of product/service combinations that improve resource usage efficiency through recovery. The framework also considers socio-cultural specifications and physical and social proximity between the stakeholders in the procurement process. The framework is based on collaboration, which is a vital link between the public procurement process and the development of more sustainable business models, where the experience gained in the collaboration process serves as the bases for suppliers and procurers in improving their contribution to CE, whilst at the same time securing economic benefits for both parties. Although, in this process, the specification setting may take longer, the relationships between procurer and supplier tend to be longer lasting and stronger. This research shows that collaboration between procurers and suppliers throughout the procurement process can lead to reductions in raw material utilisation and waste generation, whilst promoting the development of new, more sustainable, business models.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5904b576968f54708e594d1b15f2c5a61ac2fc2b

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Sustainable Business Models: A Review (2019, background): “Ray and Mondal [66] 2017 Framework Qualitative Systematic literature review Witjes and Lozano [65] 2016 Theoretical Evidence Qualitative Literature synthesis Geissdoerfer et al.”
Policies for transitioning towards a circular economy: Expectations from the European Union (EU) (2020, background): “, 2019; Lazarevic and Valve, 2017), public procurement (Witjes and Lozano, 2016; Wu et al., 2014), market mechanisms (Cruz-Pastrana and Franco-García, 2019), education, promotion, and upskilling (Schroeder et al.”
An Integrated Hybrid Approach for Circular supplier selection and Closed loop Supply Chain Network Design under Uncertainty (2020, background): “Witjes and Lozano (2016) proposed a procurement framework toward reducing resource utilization.”
Barriers to the Circular Economy: Evidence From the European Union (EU) (2018, background): “Yet, in order to reach full circularity a company requires its supply chain to commit to the CE (Witjes and Lozano, 2016; Dijksma and Kamp, 2016).”
Exploring institutional drivers and barriers of the circular economy: A cross-regional comparison of China, the US, and Europe (2017, background): “The CE theory suggests that increasing resource efficiency and waste reduction throughout the lifecycle of produced goods are, in fact, unexplored economic opportunities that have the potential for economic growth (Ghisellini et al., 2016; Witjes and Lozano, 2016).”
Exploiting the Potential of Public Procurement: Opportunities for Circular Economy (2019, background): “In addition, CE aims at transforming waste into resources and bridging the gap between production and consumption activities (Witjes and Lozano 2016).”