Evaluating the Circular Economy readiness of manufacturing companies at the micro level

The transition from linear business models to a Circular Economy (CE) is a great opportunity for industrial organizations to gain competitive advantage while decoupling economic growth from resource extraction and waste generation. However, manufacturing companies frequently fail in understanding where to start in approaching such a systemic transition, as fundamental changes are needed at the micro level in the design of products, production processes, business models and supply chains. Scientific literature has only recently started to discuss CE extensively, still giving little support on how CE can be introduced in industrial organizations. Previous works investigated CE readiness assessment for manufacturing organizations at the micro level in a scattered way. Prieto-Sandoval et al. (2018) established a list of key elements needed for assessing the level of CE implementation under the three categories of circular fields of action, industrial symbiosis and environmental certifications. Camacho-Otero and Ordoñez (2017) developed a conceptual framework to define the key elements that a company circularity assessment should include, based on expert interviews. Saidani et al. (2017) provided an overview of three methods to evaluate the product performance in the light of CE principles. Despite these attempts, there is still a general disagreement on what evaluating elements and circularity criteria should be used for assessing the readiness of manufacturing organizations for the CE. Moreover, the complexity of the CE paradigm is still far from being fully considered in existing tools. For instance, the Circular Economy Toolkit (Evans and Bocken, 2014) is an assessment tool intended to support a circularity assessment of a product or a service offered by a company, with the aim of indicating the potential areas for improvement. It studies 33 evaluation elements divided into specific groups of questions, covering the design, manufacture and distribution phases of the product under assessment, its usage phase, its repair and maintenance activities, its reuse, remanufacturing and recycling potential, and finally its ‘product-as-a-service’ opportunity. The tool has the advantage of being user-friendly, but the assessment is however limited to a single product. Moreover, supply chain aspects of CE are neglected by this tool. Similarly, the CE Indicators Prototype (Cayzer et al., 2017) is a tool that provides an overall assessment of the circularity of a product, diversifying the analysis into the general five phases of its life cycle, namely Design/Redesign, Production, Marketing, Use, and End of life. The CEIP uses a points-based questionnaire which is utilized to compute a simple final numerical result with minimum and maximum limits. The obtained overall score is representative of the circularity performance of the product. To provide a first attempt into filling these gaps, this research proposes the C-Readiness assessment tool, to assess the readiness of manufacturing companies for adopting the CE paradigm at the micro level. Our C-Readiness assessment tool provides an improved understanding of CE for manufacturing firms, supporting them in assessing their potential and giving insights on where to start to address such transition at the micro level. The next step of the research will involve the development of the tool into a software platform to automate the collection of input data and the computation of the readiness results, as well as the testing and the validation of the tool with manufacturing companies in different industries.