The supply chain viewpoint to circular business models

Recently, the circular economy (CE) has attracted increasing attention as a way to reduce global sustainability pressures and to enable sustainable growth. A CE is an industrial system aiming to slow, close or narrow the cycles of the global economy. The lock-in to the linear supply chains of today is one of the major barriers in transition towards a CE, but academic literature is in its infancy. This paper develops a framework that helps to structure the vast concept of SCM in a CE and to classify the core SCM issues according to specific business models. The framework is applied in two cases.