Managing the Introduction of Circular Products: Evidence from the Beverage Industry

Andrea Urbinati, Davide Chiaroni and Giovanni Toletti
Additional contact information
Andrea Urbinati: School of Industrial Engineering, LIUC Università Cattaneo, Corso Matteotti, 22, 21053 Castellanza (VA), Italy
Davide Chiaroni: School of Management, Politecnico di Milano, Via R. Lambruschini, 4/b, 20156 Milano (MI), Italy
Giovanni Toletti: School of Management, Politecnico di Milano, Via R. Lambruschini, 4/b, 20156 Milano (MI), Italy

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 13, 1-12

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study what managerial practices companies follow and implement in their business model to manage the introduction of Circular Products. Extensively screening extant literature in the field, we clustered a set of relevant managerial practices in four main principles of Circular Economy (CE) adoption at the product level: (i) Energy efficiency and usage of renewable sources of energy; (ii) Product and process optimisation for resource efficiency; (iii) Product design for circularity; (iv) Exploitation of waste as a resource. Then, the adoption of these principles was tested on two companies (and three Circular Products) operating in the beverage-packaging industry, where the adoption of CE is further challenged by the fact that packaging is necessary to deliver the product to consumers, but the majority of the one-way packaging is discarded after use. The identified principles provide general objectives in terms of end goals that should be achieved in order to adopt CE and manage the introduction of Circular Products. This paper shows a practical implementation of these principles on real empirical cases for theory-testing scopes.

Keywords: Circular Economy; business models; product; product design; Circular Products (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/13/3650/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/13/3650/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:13:p:3650-:d:245186

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().