Circular economy: analysis of the implementation of practices in the Brazilian network.
| Autor | Silva, Flavia Cristina |
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Introduction
The patterns of production and consumption have put substantial pressure on the environment. This fact has created the risk that the absorption capacity of the planet will be compromised and the threat of ruptures in breaking ecological stability due to the accumulation of pollution. Global sustainability depends on the dissociation of the rates of economic growth and resource consumption, so that productivity can be achieved through technological, relational and institutional innovations (Fischer-Kowalski and Swilling, 2011).
Agenda 2030, an agreement signed by more than 190 countries, includes 17 sustainable development goals (SDG). Among these, SDG 12 proposes to assure sustainable production and consumption standards. Moreover, this agreement establishes several goals, such as sustainable management, efficient use of natural resources, mitigation of pollution and its impact, the implementation of practices that prevent the generation of waste, and the prioritization of reuse and recycling processes (UN General Assembly, 2015).
The role of the governments associated with Agenda 2030 is to elaborate public policies that involve the manufacturing and agriculture sectors of society in order to meet the goal of reducing the amount of waste generated. In addition, the role of companies encompasses committing to sustainability, adopting new perspectives, realigning their business models and acting interdependently (Cepal, 2016).
Cooperation among companies is established by relationships that integrate environmental actions between suppliers and consumers. Moreover, it is the task of research to highlight that these integrated environmental actions have economic and political relevance (Ioppolo et a!., 2014).
The literature presents a profusion of studies related to the topic of cooperation among companies, which is carried out mainly in developed countries. However, with regard to Brazilian companies, the transition to sustainable production requires methodologies and practices adapted to the local reality because of the lack of structure and training (Gomes et a!., 2013).
The CE proposes to reduce the environmental impact, and at the same time, promote economic growth through business development and new revenue streams (Kalmykova et al., 2018). As a system that minimizes waste generation and emissions, and mitigates material and energy loops to preserve resources, CE can contribute to sustainability through conditional, beneficial or trade-off relationships (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017). Like environmental sciences and sustainable development, CE is aimed at helping to resolve environmental issues (Sauve et al., 2016).
This study aimed to analyze the implementation of CE practices in a network of individual entrepreneurs and small companies that participates in flows of products and by-products in common.
In addition to this introduction, this paper includes five other sections. The theoretical foundations that underlie this study are presented in Section 2, while Section 3 describes the research in terms of its methodological procedures. Further, the results are reported and discussed in Section 4. Finally, the fifth section presents the final considerations, the contributions and limitations of the research and suggestions for future studies.
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Literature review
2.1 The roots of the CE
As highlighted by Merli et a!. (2017), CE is a concept that shares many common principles with others, including industrial ecology (IE). It emerged as connected IE, which is particularly related to the exchange of the by-products and waste that are mirrored in the natural cycles of material and energy (Gregson et a!., 2015). The IE concept is described as a multidisciplinary study of industrial and economic systems and their links to essential natural resources (Allenby, 2000).
In the biological sciences, the term symbiosis is used to describe a type of interspecific harmonic relation that brings benefits to living organisms (Odum and Barrett, 2011). Similarly, IE employs the term industrial symbiosis to describe the organizational interactions related to resource and waste recycling (Lifset and Graedel, 2002).
The use of the biological analogy by IE suggests that concepts such as recycling and load capability linked to the basic characteristic of an industrial ecosystem consist in the resilience, or in other words, the ability to interact with the environment and enable its regeneration (Ehrenfeld and Gertler, 1997). The key elements of IE are the biological analogy, system perspectives, technological modifications, cooperation, dematerialization, eco-efficiency and research and development (White, 1994). IE can be stratified by the extent of the interactions. The first aspect refers to the degree of dependence on natural ecosystems in relation to the resource supply, as well as the waste and emissions disposal channels, and the level of impairment of the load capability of the planet; moreover, it is divided into elementary, intermediate and self-sufficient models (Jelinski et al, 1992; Lifset and Graedel, 2002).
There are at least two ways in which IE themes can be incorporated into a larger whole. One way is to view IE as operating partly at the firm or the unit process level (design for the environment, pollution prevention, eco-efficiency and "green" accounting), at the inter-firm (eco-industrial parks [industrial symbiosis], product life cycles and industrial sector initiatives), district or sector levels, and finally, at the regional, national or global levels (budgets and cycles, materials and energy flow studies and dematerialization and decarbonization). While the firm and unit processes are relevant, much of IE focuses on the inter-firm and inter-facility levels, because pollution prevention or related aims address many of the significant issues at the firm, facility or unit process levels (Lifset and Graedel, 2002).
Another way to link the elements together is to see them as reflecting the theoretical aspects of IE in many of the interdisciplinary aspects of the field (systemic analysis of resources and social and economic), while according Lifset and Graedel (2002), the more practical and applied aspects appear in ecodesign.
IE provides a beneficial and inclusive economy by focusing on minimizing resource consumption and waste disposal (Andersen, 2007). Like industrial symbiosis, urban symbiosis can also contribute to strengthening the CE by means of transforming physical resources into economic benefits (Su et al., 2013; Wen and Meng, 2015).
As highlighted by MacArthur et al (2015), circularity is deeply rooted in history, and CE correlates with several schools of thought. In the concept of cradle-to-cradle, CE seeks to avoid the final disposal of products and promote the recycling of materials, transforming them into inputs and raw materials (McDonough and Braungart, 2010).
Economic performance contributes to the CE through principles such as the manufacturing of durable products and focusing on maintenance services that allow the extension of the useful life of the products (Stahel, 2010). Moreover, regenerative design has influenced the CE in relation to the rational use of natural resources with the aim of avoiding their depletion and environmental degradation (Cole, 2012; Lyle, 1996).
For the CE, natural capitalism proposed the perspective that biotic and abiotic resources constitute the world's inventories of natural assets (Hawken etal., 2013); however, the blue economy suggests that energy sources should be regarded as a keystone of economic systems, which should be limited to the ecological conditions of the environment in which they are inserted (Pauli, 2010).
Biomimicry or biomimetics is recognized as a principle compatible with the CE because nature is taken as a model of design (Pomponi and Moncaster, 2017). For example, some lessons interpreted by Bhushan (2009) include the chemical energy conversion by plants, the energy production by aquatic animals, and reversible adhesion in dry and wet environments by insects, reptiles and amphibians.
The CE is a divergent concept in the literature stemming from several epistemological fields (Homrich et al., 2018). Many other correlations could be established among the CE and the major environmental concepts that have emerged in the past, including the green and bio economies. As D'Amato et al. (2017) showed, those concepts were postulated by a pool of social players such as academics, NGOs, industries and policy makers and their definitions overlap.
Kirchherr et al. (2017) identified 114 different definitions for CE, highlighting the lack of consensus. The CE refers in practical terms to reuse at three levels: the product level, such as repair or refurbish; the component level, such as, for example, remanufacturing; and the material level, which is regarded as recycling (Zink and Geyer, 2017). The CE proposes the arrangement of a system in which the efficiency of the use of resources is increased. In addition to being reduced, waste is used as a source of material and inputs for companies organized in networks that is unlikely in the linear economic standard of the consumption of resources, production and disposal (Geng et al., 2016; Koci et al., 2016). Despite the originality of the concept, proponents emphasize that the most significant contribution of the CE is the combination of different strategies from past attempts in a new framework (Bocken, Olivetti, Cullen, Potting, and Lifset, 2017).
2.2 Drivers and barriers to CE
The evolution of the CE concept has been shaped by different cultural, social and political aspects (Yu et al., 2015). For instance, while China adopted the CE as a top-down strategy of development and as a control instrument, the European Union, North America and Japan have approached this concept as a bottom-up policy (Winans et al., 2017).
At the end of the 1990s, the CE was inserted in Chinese public...
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