Circular Economy Strategy
The circular economy (CE) is a new resource use paradigm contrasting with the current linear economy as it seeks to minimize the use of virgin material inputs through key principles such as system-thinking, closing of resource loops to avoid waste production, and prolongation of material and product lifecycles. The emergence of circular public procurement, circular business models and specialized corporations and NGOs providing CE consulting and knowledge brokering is evidence of the strategic importance that CE has gained within a short time.
Still, major challenges remain relating to understanding circular economy conceptualization, its implementation and institutionalization, and the measurement of CE impacts. SusTec research contributes to closing these theoretical and practical knowledge gaps at the micro-level (e.g. businesses and other organizations), meso-level (e.g. value chains, sectors) and macro-level (e.g. countries, policymaking). One key focus is to provide guidance for the plastics and construction sectors on transitioning to a circular economy.
Another SusTec pivot is knowledge transfer to students through ETH’s only lecture on Business Models for a Circular Economy.
Key Findings:
- Simply recirculating more material is not necessarily more sustainable; practitioners need to carefully examine trade-offs among the sustainability dimensions (Download Blum et al., 2020).
- Using integrated assessment methods for measuring CE impacts supports industry players and policymakers in strategic decision-making as it allows to determine how CE implementation affects both environmental and economic impacts (Download Kulakovskaya et al., 2023).
- Structural and top-down anchoring of circular economy in the firm’s innovation strategy is paramount as it provides a basis for evaluating circular economy innovation opportunities and gearing the organizational culture and competences towards their realization (Download Kuhlmann et al., 2022).
- Integration of circular economy into companies requires a clear vision to begin with, development of circular economy management processes, and the setting up of mechanisms that reach beyond the organization as to enable collective transformation of the entire value chain (Report in German, Download Bening et al., 2023).
- To understand the processes of interorganizational sensemaking of interdependent actors, there is a need to examine organizational, value-chain, and ecosystem levels. Stakeholders’ collaborations on circular economy profit from interorganizational sensemaking as it fosters collective alignment on joint action (Download Kuhlmann et al., 2023).
- Policy pledges have successfully created a pull effect and spurred investments in the required infrastructure, but pull effects are too low for reaching the proclaimed EU targets. While demand from various industries increases, it actually poses an obstacle to progress when it drives the price of recycled plastics above producers’ willingness to pay (Download Kahlert and Bening, 2022).
- Regulation as a major driver of and barrier to CE change is best understood if the interrelations with technical and economic drivers and barriers are examined. Most literature treats barriers and solutions at industry level, however they vary with the value chain position of actors (Download Bening et al., 2022).
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