Development and validation of a tool for the integration of the circular economy in industrial companies

Circular Economy (CE) implementation is considered an instrumental strategy to help reaching the world's resource, energy, and climate mitigation targets, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030. However, major barriers must be overcome to facilitate CE implementation in industry such as cultural, market, regulatory and technological considerantions (Kirchherr et al., 2018). Improving management systems within industrial companies is crucial when implementing effective CE solutions in compliance with existing industrial standards such as quality and environmental management systems. However, it is not yet common practice yet due to the lack of standardized, suitable, and easy-to-use supporting analytical tools. This paper attempts to fill this gap by presenting Industrial Circular Economy Questionnaire (ICEQ), a self-diagnosis questionnaire built upon the revision of industrial harmonized standards and, academic literature on business-level CE assessment tools. ICEQ, compiling a set of 165 questions for company self-CE assessment, was applied to 30 industrial companies belonging to 17 economic sectors (automotive, machining and metalworking transformation, waste management, machine tool, etc.) in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) in Spain. The automotive sector stands out with 70% of circularity while Machining and metalworking transformation only has 34%, showing that the automotive sector is more conscious of CE since they must comply with End-of-Life Vehicles (EoLV) legislation

Industrial eco-productivity tool: A case study of industrial SMEs

[EN] This paper presents a new, unified method to measure and increase production and environmental performance in industrial SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), which have very limited resources, by identifying areas to improve and forming related projects. This structured, easy-to-apply method is based on standard systems to measure waste production efficiency and eco-efficiency and unifies them in a single reference value. In addition, a case study is shown where the industrial eco-efficiency of the company is obtained with the developed tool.Urain, I.; Justel, D.; F. Mendoza, JM.; Eguren, JA. (2023). Industrial eco-productivity tool: A case study of industrial SMEs. International Journal of Production Management and Engineering. 11(1):43-52. https://doi.org/10.4995/ijpme.2023.18979435211