The concept of the circular economy has gained well-recognition across the world for the past decades. With the heightening risk of the impact of climate change, resource scarcity to meet the increasing world population, the need to transition to a more sustainable development model is urgent. The circular economy is often cited as one of the best solutions to support sustainable development. However, the diffusion of this concept in the industrial arena is still relatively slow, particularly in the developing country, which collectively exerts high potential to be the world's largest economies and workforce. It is crucial to make sure that the development of these nations is sustainable and not bearing on the cost of future generation. Thus, this work aims to provide a comprehensive review of the circular economy concept in developing country context. Furthermore, a novel model is proposed by adopting Fuzzy Analytics Network Process (FANP) to quantify the priority weights of the sustainability indicators to provide guidelines for the industry stakeholders at different stages of industry cycle to transition toward the circular economy. The results revealed that improvement in economic performance and public acceptance are the key triggers to encourage stakeholders for sustainable development. The outcomes serve as a reference to enhance the overall decision-making process of industry stakeholders. Local authorities can adopt the recommendations to design policy and incentive that encourage the adoption of circular economy in real industry operation to spur up economic development, without neglecting environmental well-being and jeopardizing social benefits.

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The rising pressure on both cleaner production and sustainable development have been the main driving force that pushes mankind to seek for alternative greener and sustainable feedstocks for chemical and energy production. The biomass 'waste-to-wealth' concept which convert low value biomass into value-added products which contain high economic potential, have attracted the attentions from both academicians and industry players. With a tropical climate, Malaysia has a rich agricultural sector and dense tropical rainforest, giving rise to abundance of biomass which most of them are underutilized. Hence, the biomass 'waste-towealth' conversion through various thermochemical conversion technologies and the prospective challenges towards commercialization in Malaysia are reviewed in this paper. In this paper, a critical review about the maturity status of the four most promising thermochemical conversion routes in Malaysia (i.e. gasification, pyrolysis, liquefaction and hydroprocessing) is given. The current development of thermochemical conversion technologies for biomass conversion in Malaysia is also reviewed and benchmarked against global progress. Besides, the core technical challenges in commercializing these green technologies are highlighted as well. Lastly, the future outlook for successful commercialization of these technologies in Malaysia is included.

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