The sustainability impact of a digital circular economy

Digital technologies — such as the Internet of Things, big data and advanced analytics, additive manufacturing and 3D printing, blockchain and online platforms — are regarded as key enablers for a circular economy. A systematic literature review and analysis of 48 scientific articles published in the last five years was conducted to identify the first-, second- and third-order sustainability effects of a digital circular economy. Second-order environmental effects such as improved resource efficiency and reduction of emissions, waste and material use in products and production processes are often envisaged. However, limited attention is given to social and economic impact, and rebound effects. Existing literature also lacks a solid assessment of actual (vs expected) impact, and a more balanced consideration of negative (vs positive) effects

Systemic sustainability effects of contemporary digitalization: A scoping review and research agenda

Digital technology has been understood as a General Purpose Technology (GPT) given its systemic and pervasive nature, and heralded as key to sustainability transitions. We perform a scoping review of 112 contributions to critically appraise research on the sustainability effects of contemporary digitalization. We find that many studies adopt a rather reductionist, deterministic and optimistic lens on the (potential) sustainability effects of digital technologies, mostly neglecting the systemic effects inherent to GPTs. For a better understanding of systemic sustainability effects of contemporary digitalization, we advocate the use of exploratory designs and prospective methods, and a theoretical understanding of technologies as co-evolving with institutions and practices

The role of values in collaborative consumption: insights from a product-service system for lending and borrowing in the UK

Collaborative consumption is an emerging socio-economic model based on sharing, renting, gifting, bartering, swapping, lending and borrowing. Made possible through community interaction and, increasingly, use of network technologies, these alternative and more sustainable ways of consuming have attracted growing attention for their potential to prevent new purchases, intensify the use of idle assets and promote reuse of possessions that are no longer wanted. Nonetheless, the uptake of Product- Service Systems (PSSs) that enable collaborative consumption is still very limited. This paper investigates how consumers' values can influence the acceptance, adoption and diffusion of collaborative consumption. It reviews two theoretical frameworks used to understand pro-environmental behaviour, social psychological models of behaviour and social practice theory. Coming from contrasting disciplinary perspectives, these approaches conceptualise values differently. The paper evaluates the possibility of resolving these differences through a mixed methods study. It examines values empirically through a case study of Ecomodo, a UK-based online marketplace where people can lend and borrow each other's objects, spaces and skills, and present the results of a quantitative study which identified and measured value priorities among Ecomodo users through Schwartz's Portrait Value Questionnaire. It concludes with a discussion of the role of values in relation to the introduction and scaling up of PSSs that enable collaborative consumption

Business model diversification in the sharing economy : The case of GoMore

This paper improves our understanding of the rise of the sharing economy by shedding light on the current trend in the mobility sector for new firms to operate different business models simultaneously. A shared mobility platform is used as a case study to examine the underexplored process of diversification into a business model portfolio, and test the theoretical proposition that successful business model configurations maximize the existing resources of a firm to establish hard-to-imitate capabilities and create sustainable competitive advantage. Data collection was conducted through interviews with key informants from the platform management team and a document analysis. The analysis shows the evolution, diversification, and expansion of the sharing economy startup from a non-profit ridesharing website to a for-profit matchmaking platform offering peer-to-peer (P2P) mobility solutions (ridesharing and short-term car rental) alongside business-to-consumer (B2C) access-based services (long-term leasing). The analysis suggests that each new service subsequently offered by the case firm aimed to increase the supply of peer providers in its existing P2P business models. The business model portfolio relies on six key resources (member community, platform technology, user data, customer support, local management teams, and partners) and three key capabilities (leverage of the community’s assets, technological improvement, and user engagement), which are shared and redeployed across business models and geographic locations to improve matchmaking quality, enable growth, and increase profits

(Un-)sustainable transitions: The case of the sharing economy

The recent rise of the sharing economy - consumers granting each other temporary access to under-utilised physical assets (“idle capacity”) - has attracted the growing attention of policy-makers, businesses and the media as a potential new pathway to sustainable production and consumption. Nevertheless, there is mounting evidence that the sharing economy also has unintended negative effects such as increasing consumption and social inequality. Whether or not the sharing economy will be able to deliver on its sustainability promises is difficult to say. In this paper we use theories of practice to provide insights into the dynamics of socio-technical change, including the sharing economy, and how this may result in (un)sustainable patterns of everyday consumption. We use Shove et al.’s formulation conceptualising practices as bundles of dynamically interconnected elements: materials, competences and meanings. The different ways in which these elements are brought together have implications for how each sharing economy practice will eventually normalise and diffuse. Meanings, we argue, play a major role in the stabilisation of more or less resource-intensive sharing economy practices, thereby affecting the trajectory of sustainability transitions. In particular we illustrate how the association of meanings by prospective users to novel sharing practices may result in the sharing economy reproducing - and even reinforcing - existing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption. The sharing economy may enable the transition towards a more sustainable society. However, redirecting the sharing economy towards a desirable (sustainable) direction require multiple strategies to be set, including a comprehensive understanding of how sharing economy practices are enacted in situated contexts; trialling localised, customised, small-scale interventions engaging multiple actors simultaneously; reframing (sustainable) targets and directions progressively and in response to intermediate reconfigurations of the elements

Online and Offline Communities in the Sharing Economy

The online community is crucial to sharing economy platforms because without it, no transactions can take place. Online communities have been studied extensively, but so far, little attention has been paid to how they link to different offline communities, such as geographic (e.g., neighborhoods) and relational communities (e.g., friends and colleagues). In this study, we address this gap by examining the importance of communities to the users and the entrepreneurs of the goods-sharing platform Ecomodo. We conduct a qualitative content analysis of archival and interview data to uncover the importance of different communities and the relationships among them. We discover that the platform design aimed to facilitate lending and borrowing in relational communities. However, geographic communities were more important to the users since most of them joined the platform to be acquainted with their neighbors. We also find that the platform entrepreneurs underestimated the behavioral changes needed to use the platform. The producers were not used to asking for money to lend their possessions, and it was difficult to teach consumers to borrow instead of buying. We use these findings to offer recommendations to practitioners and discuss some avenues for further research

Digital Platforms for Industrial Symbiosis

Industrial symbiosis contributes to the realisation of a circular economy where underutilised assets are shared among different companies and the residual outputs from one industry are used as feedstock for the production processes of other industries. While digital platforms have the potential to facilitate the exchange of excess resources in industrial symbiosis networks, existing platforms have not been very successful hitherto. This research empirically investigates the barriers to industrial symbiosis and how digital platforms (fail to) address them. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eleven prospective platform providers based in Norwegian industrial parks, and two platform developers and one provider in the Netherlands. Results show that the uptake of platform-enabled industrial symbiosis is still hampered by limited commitment to sustainability, a lack of cooperation and information sharing, as well as technical and economic barriers. Platform design only partially solves the challenges specific to matchmaking platforms that facilitate the identification and exploitation of synergy opportunitie

The sustainability impact of a digital circular economy

Digital technologies — such as the Internet of Things, big data and advanced analytics, additive manufacturing and 3D printing, blockchain and online platforms — are regarded as key enablers for a circular economy. A systematic literature review and analysis of 48 scientific articles published in the last five years was conducted to identify the first-, second- and third-order sustainability effects of a digital circular economy. Second-order environmental effects such as improved resource efficiency and reduction of emissions, waste and material use in products and production processes are often envisaged. However, limited attention is given to social and economic impact, and rebound effects. Existing literature also lacks a solid assessment of actual (vs expected) impact, and a more balanced consideration of negative (vs positive) effects

The potential of Design for Behaviour Change to foster the transition to a circular economy

The negative environmental, social and economic effects of overconsumption and a throwaway culture have exposed the limits of traditional linear ‘take-make-dispose’ production and consumption patterns. Recently, the shift to a ‘circular economy’ has attracted growing interest as a possible pathway towards more sustainable ways of producing and consuming. Circular business models (e.g. product-service systems, hiring and leasing schemes, collaborative consumption, incentivised return and reuse) aim to keep resources in use for longer, extract maximum value from them whilst in use, and recover and regenerate products or components when they reach their end of life. However, these innovative propositions often encounter important corporate, regulatory and cultural barriers to their introduction. This paper discusses how Design for Behaviour Change (DfBC) – with a focus on Design for Sustainable Behaviour and Practice-oriented design – could contribute to address the latter and foster the transition to a circular economy

An Institutional Logics Perspective on the Gig Economy

We witness rising tensions between online gig-economy platforms, incumbent firms, regulators, and labor unions. In this chapter, we use the framework of institutional logics as an analytical lens and scheme to understand the fundamental institutional challenges prompted by the advent of the online gig economy. We view gig-economy platforms as corporations that organize and self-regulate markets. In doing so, they span two parallel markets: the market for platforms competing to provide intermediation services and the market for the self-employed competing on platforms to provide peer-to-peer services. Self-regulation by platforms also weakens the traditional roles of the state. While the corporation and market logics empower the platform, they weaken self-employed suppliers as platforms’ design constrain suppliers to grow into a full-fledged business by limiting their entrepreneurial freedom. At the same time, current labor law generally does not classify suppliers as employees of the platform company, which limits the possibility to unionize. The current resolutions to this institutional misalignment are sought in “band aid solutions” at the level of sectors. Instead, as we argue, macro-institutional reform may be needed to re-institutionalize gig work into established institutional logics