Can Circular Economy Tools Improve the Sustainable Management of Industrial Waste?

The circular production model indicates a restorative and regenerative system, in which the streams of materials and products take place in a cyclic way, recovering the value of waste by reducing disposal at most, creating sustainable production chains. Considering social pressures, major industrial enterprises perceived the need for readjusting their production chains according to circular chains, which are more sustainable and also consider the generated waste. In this research we aim to determine factors for sustainable waste management in major industrial enterprises based on the circular economy approach. We consider primary data on the availability of waste in a major industrial company. Approaches of circular economy, such as fault tree analysis and others, are applied to determine the conditions for the implementation of a circular process to industrial waste, especially those of lower value that have greater difficulties in being processed. The results show that the generating company alone cannot create a closed cycle for processing their waste. It is necessary to broaden the scope of participation in the production chain of industrial waste.