China's move to a Circular Economy as a development strategy

Supply Chain Configurations in the Circular Economy: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Studies on the macro-level of cities [44][45][46], economic areas [47,48], and national and global industries, particularly logistics and waste [7,14,[49][50][51][52], were only included if they informed implementation on the meso-level, as per the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Other implementation studies focus on reviewing and informing policy [13,16,17,[53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67], specifically on product design for the CE [8,9,14,[64][65][66] as well as assessments of firms' [67,68], consumers' [69][70][71], and officials' [72] awareness of and attitudes towards the CE's concepts and its components. Two contributions are concerned with business model research [73,74].…”

“…Others [13,45,55,62] name cleaner production to "protect the environment and prevent pollution" [45] (p. 506). Furthermore, biomimicry [2,64,72,73,76], system dynamics [78] and system thinking [2,78,79], regenerative design [14,76], cradle-to-cradle design [14,52,64,82], and zero emission [55,61,82] [15,17,60] and performance economy [8,14,32,52,76,78,79] are given as antecedents or inspirations.…”

“…Andrews [64], Hobson [79] and Murray et al [2] thus take a macro perspective by framing the CE as an economic model that is opposite to the "linear economic model", or classical economics [16]. Others [17,60] follow this approach by comparing it to the steady-state economy.…”

“…A large number of authors [1,17,38,50,55,60,64,71] therefore identify better access to and more funding, especially for investments in technology, as critical for firms to implement CE practices. Rizos et al [74] claim that this is especially vital for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that struggle to finance investments in technology.…”

“…While a number of industrial symbiosis case studies are given in the literature [20,26,55], the development of technology to allow for mutually beneficial exchanges between firms and new applications of by-products and waste remains a challenge, as is echoed in frequent calls for more funding on and development of technology specifically [14,16,29,54,60,71,72,77]. This is based on the claim that (a lack of) technology is a bottleneck for further environmental, particularly recycling and industrial symbiosis improvements [59], which is corroborated in case studies [21,23,56].…”