A Framework for Pairing Circular Economy and the Internet of Things

Abstract

This paper highlights the interplay between Circular Economy and Internet of Things, and identifies novel ways in which this interaction can drastically change the nature of products, services, business models and ecosystems. It emphasizes the potential of novel circular economy business models and service supply chains to unlock synergies in order to generate direct value for customers/end-users and to augment resource productivity across economies. Furthermore, we sketch an open, circular-by-design IoT architecture, where "smart" IoT objects are integrated in the IoT ecosystem with proven key circularityenabling properties to maximize IoT resource and data harvesting in a new breed of circular-by-design IoT ecosystems.

Assessing relations between Circular Economy and Industry 4.0: a systematic literature review

“…closed-loop chains) or the remanufacturing of complex products. Finally, BDA and the IoT, contrarily, do not offer a similar clearness, and they can affect the CE in several ways, such as digitalisation of CE practices, lifecycle management, exploitation of natural resources, development of CBMs, SSs, and SCM (Cattelan Nobre and Tavares 2017;Holligan, Hargaden, and Papakostas 2017;Jose and Ramakrishna 2018;Askoxylakis 2018;Alcayaga and Hansen 2017;Tjahjono et al 2017).…”

“…x (Yeo, Pepin, and Yang 2017) x Total 4 4 1 1 1 7 (Antikainen, Uusitalo, and Kivikytö-Reponen 2018) x (Askoxylakis 2018) x (Bianchini et al 2018) x (Bressanelli et al 2018b) x (Bressanelli et al 2018a) x (Chiappetta Jabbour et al 2017) x (de Man and Strandhagen 2017)…”

“…BDA can be useful for assessing innovative business models through integrative frameworks (Chiappetta Jabbour et al 2017) or for particular types of companies (Soroka et al 2017). Finally, the IoT has been described as a good way to link the CE and I4.0 (Askoxylakis 2018). These contributions showed that more efficient exploitation of field data could improve the overall circularity of a system.…”

“…However, there is still a great distance between theory and practice (Gorissen, Vrancken, and Manshoven 2016). Regarding the CE perspective, authors and scholars described challenges, opportunities, frameworks, models, and best-in-class multinationals (Angioletti et al 2016;Antikainen, Uusitalo, and Kivikytö-Reponen 2018;Askoxylakis 2018;Ge and Jackson 2014). However, very limited contributions about what kind of technologies can support the implementation of CE, especially in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), are available (Y.…”

Pairing a Circular Economy and the 5G-Enabled Internet of Things: Creating a Class of ?Looping Smart Assets?

“…To address these challenges and realize the full potential of the CE-IoT interplay, the following two fundamental research questions arise [6]:…”