Circular economy under the impact of IT tools: a content-based review

Abstract

To overcome the problem of scarcity of presently available resources in future, the optimal strategy, emerging under the banner of ‘Circular Economy (CE)’, would be to keep the product-related resources such as material/energy, etc., always in circulation’ so that the ‘waste’ is either eliminated or at least it is minimised. As some of the industries have already started practicing it at the global level, the underlying idea behind CE is to create products which are durable, easy to reuse, remanufacture or recycle and at the same time profitable. Present paper made a n attempt, through a content-based systematic l i t e r a t u r e review, to seek an answer to the research question: ‘has the CE and Reversed Supply Chain Logistics (RSCL) nexus changed significantly under the impact of the IT tools and their applications?’ Spanning over sixty three data sets, the analysis was undertaken in terms of such features as data source, latency, data fields, work typography and the employed research tools. In the last five years or so, how the status of the CE-RSCL system has emerged under the shadow of the recent developments in the IT tools is discussed. Finally, conclusions indicating research gaps are drawn and directions for future research are portrayed.

Keywords

• circular economy
• waste management
• it-enabled tools
• reversed supply chain logistics
• industry 4.0