Abstract Description: The Circular Economy (CE) is a model that promotes in the transition toward sustainability, yet several factors can influence CE uptake. Internal and external company pressures can motivate or demotivate a company to improve their CE efforts, and there is a lack of understanding of how these pressures, and the adoption of CE practices can be measured.
To measure CE adoption within firms the study used a CE model aligned with sustainability. The CE model included actions that contained a focus on waste, by-products, and other output activities. Secondly, methods incorporated a social-science theory, evaluating self-determination. The theory defined the levels of motivation and regulation that promote self-determination. A well-established method, the Motivation Toward the Environment Scale (MTES) has been widely used to measure self-determination toward the environment. However, this research adapted the MTES for measuring self-determination of leaders within a company, where twelve statements were asked to company leaders, with each statement referring to a level of self-determination.
The results included data from sixty-nine manufacturers where descriptive statistics were used to investigate firm’s adoption of the CE. The results found that some CE practices were universally adopted compared to others, such as education and design that were rarely adopted but vital to full CE adoption. A key finding was the significance of leadership’s self-determination on positively influencing the uptake of the CE. The results discovered that when company leaders were unmotivated, they were significantly less inclined to adopt the CE, and would regularly only adopt “low-hanging fruits”, whilst those that were motivated, and thus, self-determined, were more likely to adopt CE actions ranging across several CE principles. The study provided a preeminent first glance into this manufacturing community and trialed a novel technique for measuring the adoption of sustainability using the CE.
Overall, this research paves the way for a novel technique that can be used to help practically investigate how CE practices are adopted. Furthermore, the study opens new research avenues that can be utilized globally to measure not just CE uptake, but also to better understand how leadership motivation influences sustainability progress. The study was developed to enable future data analysis to use similar methods to investigate CE uptake across other geographic areas and industries. As sustainability requirements expand over the United States, these CE studies allow for key comparisons, which can help to inform practical CE adoption to achieve sustainability.
