Organic solid waste management in a circular economy perspective – A systematic review and SWOT analysis
Introduction
In the past several decades, the linear economy has played an essential role in economic development. The linear model was central to the industrial development, but it generated unprecedented pressure on natural resources and improper waste disposal (Andrews, 2015). Managing the final disposal of solid waste became one of the greatest challenges faced by society (Barles, 2014). The waste and resource management, within the current form of linear production, does not follow a holistic approach that covers the complete production chain, from product design, raw material extraction, production, consumption, and final disposal (Singh et al., 2014). This issue has become increasingly concerning due to inadequate waste management and pressure over landfills, which are an immediate reflection of consumerism and the linear economic model, where products are quickly replaced and lose their value, even though they may still be useable (Mavropoulos et al., 2015).
Local governments are usually responsible for the waste management system and must undertake the challenge of providing an effective and efficient system to the population. They often face problems beyond the boundaries of municipal authority, such as lack of organization and financial resources, and subject complexity and multidimensionality (Yukalang et al., 2017). In this context, CE has emerged as a viable model that has the objective of closing the life cycle of products, similar to what occurs with biological cycles (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2015). The CE aims to reduce the use of virgin raw materials and waste production, to improve the circularity of the raw materials used, and to extend their lifetime, completing the economic and ecological cycles of resource flows (Haas et al., 2015).
Even though there have been recent works on CE and the management of organic solid waste is a well-established topic, there are few works that study the interface between the two areas. The results from the present study become relevant since they attempt to bridge this research gap. The objectives of this work are to identify the state of the art and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis) of organic waste management through CE principles and create a research agenda on the topic.
After this introduction, the article is structured in four additional sections. Section 2 presents this research’s theoretical concepts. Section 3 presents the research method. Section 4 presents the results and discussion. Section 5 outlines this study’s conclusions and limitations and future research proposals.
Section snippets
Circular economy
CE has been extensively investigated in the recent literature on environmental sustainability (e.g., Korhonen et al., 2018; Pinheiro et al., 2019), and its concepts have been discussed for decades (e.g., Andersen, 2007; Graedel, 1996). In the 1990’s researchers started studying the areas of industrial ecology and industrial symbiosis, which consider the creation of competitive advantages by connecting industries through input exchanges (Chertow, 2000). Industrial symbiosis had low coverage in
Research methodology
Many researchers have utilized a systematic literature review combining quantitative and qualitative strategies to examine the interrelation and trends of the topics considered in this work (Gaur and Kumar, 2017; Luiz et al., 2016). For this study, the systematic review was used with bibliometric, similarity, data coding, and content analyses as used by Cui (2018) and Homrich et al. (2018). The synergy, formulated by the combination of approaches, aims to solve research issues and practical
Results and discussion
Table 2 shows the classification of the 33 articles selected based on the dimensions presented in Table 1. The next subsection presents each dimension, classified and categorized, and the main gaps and future research opportunities.
Conclusions and research agenda
The concept of CE has been discussed for some decades, but its taxonomy is recent and has been used with increased frequency by the scientific literature. Few works in this literature explore the interface between CE and management of organic waste, the latter being a well-established research topic. The objective of this paper was to fill in this research gap by means of a systematic literature review and SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), followed by a proposed
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Brazilian research funding agency CAPES.
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