Sustainable production: The economic returns of circular economy practices

Abstract

Assessing the economic consequences of sustainable production choices aimed at reducing negative environmental externalities is crucial for policy making, in light of the increasing interest and awareness experienced in recent EU policy packages. This assessment is one of the goals of the current work, which tries to provide new empirical evidence on the economic returns of circular economy practices, drawing on previous literature on the underlying determinants of greener production choices, which are stated to differ from standard technological innovations as they are subject to a knowledge and an environmental externality. Using an original dataset on approximately 3000 Italian manufacturing firms, we provide evidence on the relations among innovations related to the circular economy concept and economic outcome in the short run. The evidence shows that in the short run, it is difficult to obtain economic gains from circular economy related innovations when taken in isolation, especially for Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), who may also experience negative returns.

Impact of circular economy network building: resilience strategy to climate action

“…The total score accounted for 0-10 points; the higher the score, the more bridged the reduce policy network partners. The reuse policy network was evaluated based on the number of the following intermediation sources, representing the reusing and remaking capability of the offshore subsidiaries bridged (Antonioli et al, 2022;Le et al, 2022): headquarters; individual reusing and remaking worker; Taiwanese reusing and remaking institute; local reusing and remaking institute; third-country reusing and remaking institute; and others. For each item, the respondents answered either "Yes" (coded 1) if they bridged the source or "No" (coded 0) otherwise.…”

“…MGA analysis of climate change * firm size (2*2) scenarios. We adopted Climate Change Performance Index 2013-2018 to measure the Contingency 1 of climate change pressure (high and low)(CCPI, 2023); the number of employees is used as the proxy variable for firm size for the Contingency 2 (Antonioli et al, 2022). The quantity "5250 employees" refers to small and medium firm size; ">250 employees" refers to large firm size.…”

Proposition of a structural model for business value creation based on circular business models, innovation, and resource recovery in the pet industry

“…The direct implication of this relationship is the decoupling of economic growth from the need to exploit virgin resources (Esposito et al, 2018). As the circular economy and resource recovery practices gain prominence in industry and academia and receive greater focus from the government, the innovation of the business model for circularity becomes essential for the creation of strategies to create value in companies (Antonioli et al, 2022; Jabbour et al, 2020). Such projection demands planning for operationalizing the development of products, processes, and business models in order to reduce the pressure on the environment and the extraction of resources and, thus, producing positive effects on society (Geissdoerfer et al, 2020).…”

Unpacking the value conversion in a circular business model: exploring the effect of competitive criteria

“…It is worth mentioning that there is empirical evidence that CE brings benefits, including economic benefits (Khan et al, 2020). However, while CE costs are immediate, their returns may only be in the longer term, considering different scopes in terms of time (Antonioli et al, 2022). In addition to the factors above, it is essential to note that progress towards sustainability is impossible without CBM implementation (Upadhyay et al, 2019).…”

“…, 2020). However, while CE costs are immediate, their returns may only be in the longer term, considering different scopes in terms of time (Antonioli et al. , 2022).…”