Tools for assessing qualitatively the level of circularity of organisations: Applicability to different sectors

Abstract

The transition towards a circular economy (CE) has been identified as one of the biggest challenges for our society in general and for organisations in particular. In this context, organisations have begun to call for methods to measure their level of circularity and therefore, in recent years, various specific CE tools have been developed. The objective of this study is to analyse the applicability, utility and user-friendliness of CE tools that autonomously measure the level of circularity of organisations by using qualitative data. For this purpose, seven qualitative CE tools (CAS2.0, CE-Diagnosis, CircularTRANS, Circulytics, CM-FLAT, INEDIT and MATChE) are selected and applied to four organisations (two belonging to the service sector and two to the production sector). The results show that, due to the absence of uniformity, regularity, and singularity in the CE assessment, the circularity indicators included in each CE tool analysed are different; therefore, the level of circularity calculated for each specific organisation by means of the different CE tools are comparable. Moreover, the CE tools are heterogeneous in terms of content, length and number of questions; and they do not incorporate the specific characteristics of the different sectors of the organisations analysed. Furthermore, after gathering the opinions of managers regarding the applicability of each CE tool to each organisation, it is observed that the existing CE tools can be useful but need further development. For these reasons, further research and development of standardised sectoral CE tools that consider sector specificities and allow organisations to obtain accurate and comparable results is needed.