Browsing by Author "Liu, Qinglan"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Barriers to transitioning towards smart circular economy: A systematic literature review
    (Springer, 2021-09-18) Lobo, Ana; Hofmann Trevisan, Adriana; Liu, Qinglan; Yang, Miying; Mascarenhas, Janaina
    This paper defines smart circular economy as an industrial system that uses digital technologies to implement circular strategies such as reduce, reuse, remanufacturing and recycling. The smart circular economy has been regarded as a promising approach to enhance sustainability. However, barriers exist in various stages of the transition towards smart circular economy. This paper employs a systematic literature review to identify the main barriers that prevent companies from this transition. We adopt a change management perspective to study this transition and propose that it follows a classical three-step process of organizational change: unfreeze, move, and refreeze. We identified 24 barriers in five categories: finance, management, infrastructure, network, and technology. Then, we placed the barriers into the three steps to further investigate how they affect each stage of the transition. Our analysis suggests that: (a) stakeholders play a central role in the process; (b) companies often have financial issues in the early steps of change; (c) technological challenges emerge in the advanced steps. The findings can help diagnose companies’ current status, identify solutions to tackle the barriers and predict future challenges.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Digitalisation for water sustainability: Barriers to implementing circular economy in smart water management
    (MDPI, 2021-10-27) Liu, Qinglan; Yang, Longjian; Yang, Miying
    “Clean water and sanitation” is listed as one of the 17 United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and implementing circular economy principles in the water sector has been widely regarded as an important approach in achieving this goal. In the era of Industry 4.0, research and practice in the digitalisation of the water sector to create a smart water system have attracted increasing attention. Despite the growing interest, limited research has been devoted to how digital technologies might enhance circularity. In practice, smart water systems often fail to promote circularity in such aspects as water reuse and resources recovery. This paper aims to identify the main barriers to implementing circularity in the smart water management system in Zhejiang, China. The research adopts a mixed research method that includes a literature review to identify the potential barriers from the existing studies, a case study to determine the most critical barriers in practice, and a fuzzy Delphi method to reach a consensus on the crucial barriers. The research identified 22 main barriers to implementing circular economy in smart water management. The barriers are divided into three categories: infrastructure and economic, technology, and institution and governance. The results show that the barriers related to recycling technologies, digital technology know-how, and the lack of CE awareness raise the most concern. Our findings also indicate that experts are interested in the decentralized wastewater treatment system. This research provides significant insights that practitioners, researchers, and policymakers can use in developing and implementing digital-based CE strategies to reduce water scarcity and pollution.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    A framework of digital technologies for the circular economy: digital functions and mechanisms
    (Wiley, 2022-02-23) Liu, Qinglan; Hofmann Trevisan, Adriana; Yang, Miying; Mascarenhas, Janaina
    Digital technology is regarded as providing a promising means of moving production and consumption towards the circular economy. However, it is still unclear which functions of digital technologies are most useful to improving circularity, and how these functions could be used to enhance different circular economy strategies. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap by conducting a systematic literature review. After examining 174 papers, creating 782 original codes and 259 second-round codes, the study identifies 13 critical functions of digital technologies which are most relevant to circular economy strategies. The paper then proposes a framework which reveals seven mechanisms of how these digital functions can enhance different circular economy strategies. The framework also reveals which combinations of the digital functions and circular economy strategies have already been studied extensively as well as where there may be gaps. This indicates which digital functions are more mature in terms of possible implementation for circular economy as well as what missing links there are in the empirical and theoretical research. The study advances the synergies between digital technologies and the circular economy paradigm through the lens of digital functions. The proposed framework and mechanisms build a theoretical foundation for future research, and we highlight five research areas for further studies. This study also provides a structured way for managers to explore the appropriate digital functions for their CE strategies, so as to identify required digital technologies and new value creation through digital functions.