Original title: Unlocking circular business: A framework of barriers and drivers
A circular business tries to keep materials and products in use instead of treating them as waste. The paper sorts factors that can help or block this kind of business into seven areas, including money, technology, supply chains, and workplace organization. The researchers draw the framework from existing research and examine it through interviews with people at four organizations. Their examples show how these factors can matter in practice.
Imagine trying to make dinner with ingredients from a shared kitchen. You may have a good recipe, but missing supplies, a tight budget, unclear rules, or other people’s routines can get in the way. In this paper, making dinner stands for putting a circular business into practice, while those everyday obstacles and supports stand for the seven areas the framework organizes.
Businesses trying to reduce waste and use resources in circular ways may face more than a technical problem: economic, social, political, supply-chain, and organizational factors can also help or hinder them. This framework gives managers a way to examine those factors when putting circular business ideas into practice.
The abstract reports interviews at four case organizations, but does not say how representative they are or whether the framework applies across industries or regions. It describes potential barriers and drivers and managerial implications; it does not report measured business or environmental outcomes.
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Unlocking circular business: A framework of barriers and drivers — Nina Tura, Jyri Hanski, Tuomas Ahola et al. — Journal of Cleaner Production — doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.11.202
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.