Managing the introduction of circular products: Evidence from the beverage industry

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study what managerial practices companies follow and implement in their business model to manage the introduction of Circular Products. Extensively screening extant literature in the field, we clustered a set of relevant managerial practices in four main principles of Circular Economy (CE) adoption at the product level: (i) Energy efficiency and usage of renewable sources of energy; (ii) Product and process optimisation for resource efficiency; (iii) Product design for circularity; (iv) Exploitation of waste as a resource. Then, the adoption of these principles was tested on two companies (and three Circular Products) operating in the beverage-packaging industry, where the adoption of CE is further challenged by the fact that packaging is necessary to deliver the product to consumers, but the majority of the one-way packaging is discarded after use. The identified principles provide general objectives in terms of end goals that should be achieved in order to adopt CE and manage the introduction of Circular Products. This paper shows a practical implementation of these principles on real empirical cases for theory-testing scopes.