Overcoming the Main Barriers of Circular Economy Implementation through a New Visualization Tool for Circular Business Models

Abstract

There is a huge gap between the broad concept of circular economy (CE) and its practical implementation in the industrial sector due to several types of barriers, which shall be led back to the lack of consistent and precise information about resources, products, and processes. Without a proper information flow, it is impossible to quantify circular initiatives, both in comparison with the actual linear situation or with circular alternative opportunities. A proper quantification of circular initiatives allows the assessment of economic, environmental and social benefits and the preventative identification of potential barriers and relative solutions, monitoring the risk associated with circular investments and supporting the decision-making process. This paper describes a new tool to ensure the quantification of circular initiatives and the method to define it. It is a new Circular Business Model (CBM) visualization tool, which overcomes the main limitations of the existing models able to explain CE concepts but not to boost its practical implementation in industry. The new CBM visualization tool can be adopted in every industrial sector to highlight circular opportunities that are still hidden or unexploited or to select the best CE strategy. The proposed CBM visualization tool differs from the previous diagrams in two main characteristics: (i) the possibility to quantify resource flows and important indicators representing energy consumption, environmental and social impact, and (ii) the focus, which is not only on the product, but on the whole system, involving also the process, the company and the entire supply chain. The methodology to adopt and adapt the proposed model to different scales is described in detail. To provide a practical example, the model was qualitatively applied to a generic technical product to highlight its potential in the identification and quantification of circular activities.

A Multi-Criteria Evaluation Method of Product-Level Circularity Strategies

“…There are various factors that influence the choice of a circularity strategy of products at EoL stage [12,14,61] (see Section 2.2). Based on a systematic literature review, Alamerew and Brissaud (2018) [49], developed a list of CE evaluation criteria as well as sub-criteria, and evaluation indicators that are presented in Table 2.…”

“…Research focused on the evaluation of circularity strategies for products and services compared to each other or to their business-as-usual counterparts or other products in the same product group which are just starting to take off [14]. More generally, there is a lack of evaluation methods of CE strategies of products and services at the micro level, i.e., product, company or single consumer-level [9,[15][16][17] and there are few studies that have conducted and presented evaluations of such circularity strategies [9,18,19].…”

A Study on Assessing a Business Viability for Transition to a Circular Economy

“…Moreover, knowing one's own business model will help the company determine the status of resource availability, customer or market awareness, and financial feasibility before initiating circular modalities. Bianchini et al (2019) asserted that BMC should be easy to understand, replicate real situations, fully depict circular initiatives, quantify the circular initiatives, and focus on maintenance as a stage of the product lifecycle. The BMC helps develop business plans (Ching & Fauvel, 2013), and the BMC should be flexible enough to accommodate changes in the environment (Dudin et al, 2015).…”

“…These strategies are not mutually exclusive and could be practiced throughout the product life cycle. A shift from a linear to a circular economy reduces the need for primary raw material, reduces the amount of waste to landfills, extends the life cycle of resources, and revalorizes the products and resources at the end of life (Bianchini et al, 2019). Table 1 summarizes the circular strategies as put forth by Achterberg et al (2016) that could be adopted by an organization.…”

An Overview of the Transition to a Circular Economy in Emilia-Romagna Region, Italy Considering Technological, Legal–Regulatory and Financial Points of View: A Case Study

“…Additionally, others describe a CE's progress in countries, sectors and firms [10][11][12]. More recently, some models related to the CE measurement through key performance indicators, covering the environmental, social and economic dimensions were proposed [13,14]. Although many studies are related to the CE, mostly in the previous years, these studies lack theoretical consistency [3].…”