Circular economy in the manufacturing sector as enabler of sustainable manufacturing

The role of manufacturers for our society is gaining importance more and more, and currently the manufacturing is considered one of the most polluting and resource greedy sectors. The inefficiencies registered in manufacturing boost the uncontrollable rise of resources consumption and the rise of CO2 emissions, which nowadays represent two of the major problems affecting the society. To tackle these issues, policymakers have promoted the sustainable developed goals (SDG) and, both industry and scientific literature have started to investigate the potentialities of sustainable manufacturing to address this goals. More recently the attention has been moved over a new economy, called “circular economy” (CE). This paradigm, characterised by specific principles, aims to design systems allowing the regeneration and restoration of resources. The present work aims to elucidate how CE paradigm operates as driver of sustainable manufacturing through the adoption by manufacturers of different CE strategies. Indeed, this contribution presents how the CE principles have been translated in the manufacturing context through specific strategies, by highlighting their economic, environmental and social potentialities to embrace the SDGs. Understanding what are the applicable CE strategies and their sustainable potentialities would facilitate the transition towards circular industries by making manufacturers more aware of the possible paths to be undertaken and related benefits. This paper is based on a literature review, grounded on English-written documents available on Scopus and Web of Science. Moreover, this review, on the basis of the scientific literature gaps, paves the way for future research directions.