Integrating Backcasting and Eco‐Design for the Circular Economy: The BECE Framework

Abstract

SummaryThe circular economy (CE) is essential for decoupling economic growth from resource consumption and environmental impacts. However, effective implementation requires a systemic change across supply chains, involving both technological and nontechnological innovations. Frameworks are beginning to emerge to foster CE thinking in organizations. However, literature review carried out as part of this research has revealed gaps in their ability to fulfil CE requirements. Furthermore, few frameworks provide support on how CE requirements may be implemented. To address these issues, this article presents a new framework, BECE (backcasting and eco-design for the circular economy), to ensure that businesses can implement CE requirements more readily. BECE empowers organizations to tackle the CE holistically by embedding the concept into corporate decision making and by bringing operational and systems thinking together, thus increasing the likelihood of successful implementation. The potential of the BECE framework was tested through a pilot workshop focusing on the development of a CE business model through redesign of products and supply chains. Using vacuum cleaners as an illustrative case study, several product design and supply-chain alternatives were identified, including the development of scenarios and action plans for their implementation at the business level. Although the case study focuses on a particular product, the BECE framework is generic and applicable across different products and business sectors. Keywords:business model innovation circular economy closed-loop supply chain industrial ecology product-service systems resource efficiency Supporting information is linked to this article on the JIE website

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

“…A first finding here is that, in the vast majority of the analysed articles, the CE aspires to become a replacement for the current (linear) economic framework and is intentionally designed to be regenerative and restorative with its individual strategies aimed at different levels of that framework [1,2,16,64,73,76,79]. This new economic framework is, however, unlike classical economics, assumed to be regenerative, which implies that the ecosphere is allowed to recover from the effects of polluting economic activity over time [1], or ideally restorative, which "also aims to repair previous damage" [2] (p. 5), aside from preventing such damage, e.g.…”

“…Embedding such novel products in profitable business models to recuperate the investment in the product and support the SC infrastructure is another challenge [7][8][9]14,70,73,74] that in some cases hinges on top-down intervention or subsidies to become feasible [37] or might not be financially successful despite superior environmental performance [34]. Product-service systems (PSSs) are claimed to be one possible vehicle to monetize design and maintenance efforts through long-term customer relationships, but are difficult to implement successfully due to SC infrastructure requirements and persisting consumer reservations [7,8], especially if the subsequent product should be remanufactured instead of being new [70].…”

“…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.…”

“…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]. More abstract studies seek to define the CE more clearly and assess its future challenges [75][76][77][78] or highlight the social [2,15,79,80] or economic aspects of the concept further [1,18].…”

Integrating Sustainability in Product Requirements

“…Contributions taking place on this level included: the BECE framework (Mendoza et al, 2017) in which backcasting and eco-design are utilised to achieve alignment with circular economy principles; The Value Ideation process (Geissdoerfer et al, 2016) where design thinking is employed in the early innovation process to define alternative value drivers; and the Systemic double flow scenario method (Gaziulusoy et al, 2013) where product requirements are influenced from linking product development projects to societal structures. Four papers proposed meta-level perspectives, i.e., management of sustainability integration in the product development process (Brones and de Carvalho, 2015), including both concept generation (Maxwell and Van der Vorst, 2003;Waage et al, 2005;Waage, 2007) and redesign of a concept (Fargnoli et al, 2014).…”