Abstract
Circular economy (CE) aims to create a sustainable economy while keeping economic growth intact, by internalizing negative externalities, such as waste. Research on this subject has come far on the macro level (e.g., legislative recommendations) and the meso level (e.g., life cycle engineering (LCE), circular supply chain (CSC), and circular value chain (CVC)), but less so on the micro level (i.e., the level of the individual firm). The issue this creates is that the businesses (which are the very basis of the economy) do not have clear frameworks, guidelines, or tools to reshape their own business in such a way that they can participate in a circular economy, hence hampering the development of a circular economy. In this research, we have created a circular production chain (CPC) that takes into account the resources, production process, product, and waste a company produces, through three aspects: imput, design, and output, but also places the company in the bigger picture, that is, the economy, and shows how CE is achieved by multiple companies working together, highlighting the importance of tactical management. In the process we uncover three main influences that facilitate or inhibit the implementation of CE practices in a single business.
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Van Cauwenberghe, W., Petrevska Nechkoska, R., Poels, G. (2023). Circular Production Chains: A Micro and Meso Approach. In: Petrevska Nechkoska, R., Manceski, G., Poels, G. (eds) Facilitation in Complexity. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11065-8_5
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