Transitioning the apparel supply chain to circular economy: a quantitative approach

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the potential of implementing circular economy in global supply chains, from the economic and environmental perspectives. The scientific community has revealed a growing interest in deepening the topic of global circular supply chain management, although literature based on quantitative studies is almost scant. This paper aims at filling some significant gaps by demonstrating that a transition to a circular supply chain not just leads to savings of emissions and natural resources, but it is also a driver to boost profitability. To this purpose, a real-life case-study of a global supply chain in the apparel industry has been modelled and simulations are conducted to quantitatively evaluate the benefits of three different circular supply chains implementing Reuse, Remanufacture and recycled processes over a traditional linear configuration. Results are obtained through a robust design of experiments and are validated via ANOVA test. According to the findings, a circular supply chain configuration can boost profitability by more than 5%, reducing at the same time the consumption of environmental resources by more than 10%.