Transitioning the apparel supply chain to circular economy: a quantitative approach

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the potential of implementing circular economy in global supply chains, from the economic and environmental perspectives. The scientific community has revealed a growing interest in deepening the topic of global circular supply chain management, although literature based on quantitative studies is almost scant. This paper aims at filling some significant gaps by demonstrating that a transition to a circular supply chain not just leads to savings of emissions and natural resources, but it is also a driver to boost profitability. To this purpose, a real-life case-study of a global supply chain in the apparel industry has been modelled and simulations are conducted to quantitatively evaluate the benefits of three different circular supply chains implementing Reuse, Remanufacture and recycled processes over a traditional linear configuration. Results are obtained through a robust design of experiments and are validated via ANOVA test. According to the findings, a circular supply chain configuration can boost profitability by more than 5%, reducing at the same time the consumption of environmental resources by more than 10%.

Keywords:

• Supply chain management
• circular supply chains
• apparel industry
• simulation

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS:

• SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production

Acknowledgements

The Authors wish to thank the anonymous referees and the Associate Editor for providing many helpful suggestions that remarkably improved the seminal version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clarissa Amico

Clarissa Amico is a PhD candidate at the School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano (Italy). Her research interests include topics relating to supply chain management. Her current university research includes the study of future trends in supply chain management (e.g., electric vehicle, blockchain technology and circular economy) along with the study of integrating sales and operations planning through integrated business planning. She studied six months in Portugal (Porto) at the University of Economics (FEP University). Before starting her Ph.D., she worked in the company for two years in Finance.

Roberto Cigolini

Roberto Cigolini is full professor of Supply Chain Management and of Operations Management at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano (Italy). His main research interests are primarily related to business planning and control, supply chain planning, collaborative forecasting, planning for circular economy and supply chain finance. He is director of the Global Executive Master in Operations and Supply Chain management (GEMOS) at Polimi Graduates School of Management. He is guest professor at Eada Business School Barcelona (Spain) and at Krannert School of Management (Purdue University – USA). He is also member of the teaching body of the PhD program in Management Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and founding member of the Technical Committee on Semiconductor Factory Automation (IEEE Robotics and Automation Society). Over the years, he has provided advice to several companies in the field of operations and supply chain management, and he has been a founding partner of Masterplan Consulting Ltd. for more than a decade.

Mattia Brambilla

Mattia Brambilla (Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in telecommunication engineering and the Ph.D. degree (cum laude) in information technology from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, in 2015, 2017, and 2021, respectively. He was a Visiting Researcher with the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), La Spezia, Italy, in 2019. In 2021, he joined the Faculty of Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB), Politecnico di Milano, as a Research Fellow. His main research interests include signal processing, statistical learning, and data fusion for cooperative localisation and communication. Other research interests include modelling and simulation for supply chain.