Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review
By Juana Camacho-Otero, Casper Boks, Ida Nilstad Pettersen. Sustainability, 2018
429 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A circular economy (CE) aims at decoupling value creation from waste generation and resource use by radically transforming production and consumption systems. Recent reviews on the topic of the circular economy have indicated that cultural barriers are a significant factor hindering the diffusion of so-called ‘circular’ business models, particularly the lack of consumer—or user—acceptance. However, none of them has provided an overview of the existing literature addressing such issues that can help academics and practitioners better understand consumption considerations when addressing the circular economy. Motivated by these observations, this paper presents the results of a literature review that summarises and discusses insights from 111 articles in terms of the problem area, theoretical approaches, methods, and tools that have been used to collect and analyse data, the main issues, and identified research gaps. The results show that most of the existing scientific work on the circular economy and circular solutions addressing consumption has focussed on identifying factors that drive or hinder the consumption of circular solutions. A smaller but expanding set of articles has focussed on offering insights into the nature, meaning, and dynamics of consumption in the context of the circular economy. According to this set of articles, consumption in the circular economy is anonymous, connected, political, uncertain, and based on multiple values, not only utility. A smaller set of papers has explored the integration of user and consumer perspectives into design processes. Although these contributions are relevant, opportunities for further research are still open, particularly regarding socio-material and cultural aspects of consumption in the context of the circular economy, and the role of digitalisation. In addition, more work could be done regarding strategies to foster not only acceptance but also the adoption and diffusion of the circular economy. Based on the findings of this literature review, some ideas for a research agenda on the issue of consumption in the circular economy are outlined.
Subfields: Marketing, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2e5f63be0adf2745e51b2b0a418f93b10dc598e
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
- Colin Fitzpatrick
- O. Muldoon
- R. Kuehr
- Marit Moe Bjørnbet
- N. Ada
- Muruvvet Deniz Sezer
- Idil Ozer
- Cigdem Ede-Senturk
Citations in the corpus
- Behavioral change for the circular economy: A review with focus on electronic waste management in the EU (2020, background): “The social and behavioral elements linked to consumption of everyday goods, and how they need to be adapted to enable regular people to facilitate the success of a circular system, remain largely unexplored (Camacho-Otero et al., 2018).”
- Analyzing Barriers of Circular Food Supply Chains and Proposing Industry 4.0 Solutions (2021, background): “Besides, governments should also support innovation policies to provide circularity while government procurement standards should be consider recycled products [62].”
- Circular economy in manufacturing companies: A review of case study literature (2021, background): “Literature reviews covered a range of topics, including CE and consumption (Camacho-Otero et al., 2018), CBMs (de Sousa Jabbour et al.”