Towards a circular economy production system: trends and challenges for operations management.

From a theoretical perspective, a number of concepts, approaches and/or paradigms have been related to CE, such as cradle-to-cradle, sustainability, industrial ecology, blue economy, circular business models, closed loop value chain, green supply chain and closed loop supply chain to name a few. The paper by Batista et al. (2019) 'Circular supply chains in emerging economies - a comparative study of packaging recovery ecosystems in China and Brazil' proposes a circular supply chain framework to derive insights from specific packaging recovery supply chain ecosystems. In terms of scope circular supply chains extend the boundaries of closed-loop supply chains by taking into account post-production stewardship to include forward feeding flows (open loops) into alternative supply chains. We realise that the preferred approach to implementing circular economy principles on production systems is supply chain management-based models, in particular, closed-loop supply chain management. [Extracted from the article]