Circular supply chain orchestration to overcome Circular Economy challenges: An empirical investigation in the textile and fashion industries

Abstract

The transition towards Circular Economy is needed, all the more in industries with a harmful environmental impact such as the textile and fashion ones. This transformation, however, presents several challenges. While these challenges have been widely investigated in literature, solutions to overcome them have received much less attention to date. Practices and strategies proposed by the literature are still largely fragmented and not interpreted through an overarching theory, which prevents the understanding of how circular supply chains should be managed and coordinated. Therefore, this paper proposes a circular supply chain orchestration approach to understand responses to Circular Economy adoption barriers in the textile and fashion supply chains. A multiple case study has been carried out in the Prato (Italy) regenerated wool district, which has been practicing Circular Economy for more than a century. The paper contributes to knowledge accumulation on circular supply chain orchestration by integrating the resource orchestration, supply chain orchestration and Circular Economy streams. It adopts this perspective as a theoretical lens to analyse responses to challenges and, in particular, to operationalize the general orchestration mechanisms pointed out in the extant literature. Our study also provides support to managers in the textile supply chain to design challenge-response orchestration mechanisms in the move towards Circular Economy.