Cleaner Engineering and Technology (Jun 2021)
Thinking green: The role of smart technologies in transforming cities’ waste and supply Chain’s flow
Abstract
The literature on sustainability is vast and spans across social, economic and environmental domains. This paper looks at the role digital technologies can have in helping the transition to environmentally sustainable conducts across the different domains of economic life. In particular, it investigates the green potential yield in the development of Smart Cities as facilitators of sustainable practices at the individual and supply chain levels. Smarter cities and industries can help the transition to more ecological modes of production and distribution of goods, making our supply networks greener and realise the ambitious Circular Supply Chain (CSC) project. The present work proposes a formulation of the Smart City as centred on users’ needs and illustrates how a Smart City can be instrumental to realising a Circular Economy (CE) reporting the case of solid waste management. It introduces Circular Supply Chains as the optimal solution to attain green management practices inside the production network and argues that Smart Cities are crucial to deliver the desired circularity in the chain.
