Making the transition to a Circular Economy within manufacturing companies: the development and implementation of a self-assessment readiness tool

Circular Economy (CE) is a key approach to supporting a transition towards sustainable growth. However, due to the lack of understanding of readiness for the CE transition, manufacturing companies still face a number of challenges in successfully implementing CE. This paper describes the development of a CE readiness self-assessment tool, MATChE (MAking the Transition to a Circular Economy), following iterative cycles of theoretical development and empirical co-development with potential users.

The resulting web-based platform enables a self-assessment of manufacturing companies’ readiness to transition to CE. In addition to allowing the understanding of strengths and gaps for CE implementation across eight key dimensions (e.g. strategy and business model innovation), the tool enables internal and external benchmarking studies (at the company or business unit levels); the prioritisation of focus areas based on strategic drivers; and the development of transition paths with support of CE-related tools, methods and approaches.

The MATChE tool is, at the time of writing, supporting over 330 manufacturing companies (incl. 900+ users), spread across 16 manufacturing sectors and 38 countries. Future research is ongoing to minimise the limitations of the tool and expand its scope beyond manufacturing companies, in a number of different directions (e.g. service providers and waste management companies).