Authors
Fontana, Alessandro; Barni, Andrea; Rossi, Ludovica; Leone, Deborah
Abstract
Circular Economy (CE) is nowadays shifting from a nice to have marketing operation, to a business development strategy central to the restoring and preservation of our natural ecosystem. However, despite the motivated promoting efforts, the concrete application of the model at the micro-level is still in its infancy, due to several challenges that companies face. One of these challenges can be framed in the uncertainty that businesses have in estimating the actual impact that the adoption of CE strategies can have on their activities under the environmental and economic perspective. This work aims at defining a methodology, applied to equipment lifecycle extension strategies (LCES), meant to understand wether the application of a strategy is beneficial from an environmental or economic point of view. In order to address the identified need, a list of indicators to be exploited in the LCES performance analysis, divided in three categories, such as environmental, economic and circular, has been designed. On the top of them a calculation methodology based on the LCA and LCCA approaches is applied exploiting a gap-based approach, thus comparing the effects generated by the linear strategy with the ones created by the LCES analysed. The evaluation approach is meant to highlight the possible advantages and disadvantages offered by the CE along the equipment lifecycle. The methodology is eventually tested through an industrial use case and further analysis leading to the improvement of the calculation methodology are discussed.