Potentials of Circular Economy Approaches for Supply Chain Resilience

Abstract

With the concept of a circular economy becoming more prevalent, also its strong relevance for supply chain management is widely agreed upon. While this relationship has been an ongoing topic of debate, the links to aspects of supply chain resilience in particular only start to attract increased attention, especially given current disruptions in global supplies. For this reason, this contribution aims to map the potentials that circularity can bear for supply chain resilience from a company-level perspective. Based on a literature analysis, commonalities between circularity and resilience are identified, synthesizing respective supporting and inhibiting factors, both internally and externally. As a result, seven propositions on the potentials of circular economy for supply chain resilience are derived, which are used as a basis in order to develop a conceptual model, depicting the cause-effect relationships within the implications of circular economy for supply chain resilience.