Track: Engineering Economy

Abstract

This work presents a study about the circular economy concept, based on the interest to understand how industries can adopt an innovative business model at the same time the environment’s conservation and the equilibrium between human beings and nature is promoted. This topic clearly includes both engineering and industrial management principles and that was seen as an opportunity to study the circular economy and its influence on enterprises, Portuguese ones in particular, but not only. The main idea was to gather the existing information, analyze it with practical examples of its application and comprehend how an interested industry can start applying it. The particular case of a Purchasing Department of a Portuguese company was used as test-bed. The main contribution of this work can be seen as a short story about Circular Economy, for non-familiar readers, as well as some directions for implementing circularity, in industry.