The Circular Economy A Transformative Resilience Strategy

ABSTRACT

The devastating social, economic and mental disruption caused due to pandemic has forced the decisionmakers to rewrite the script and opens up a way for transformative resilience, green and more digitally enabled strategies and recovery leading to a next wave of economic prosperity. Prior to the pandemic, many recognized the need for a new economic model that is less environmentally damaging, not much dependent on the globalized linear supply chain, cheap raw material and is less wasteful. Post pandemic crisis calls for a need to transition to a new thinking, resilience, and sustainable and circular way of doing business in alignment with other global challenges. In this reference, this study provides an insight into what resilient circular economy strategies looks like post Covid-19. Also, the study highlights the Challenges and opportunities created by resilient circular economy (CE) towards a sustainable business model. For this purpose, a semi- structured interviews are conducted with 23 executives across industries on resilience and CE. The study concludes that the transition from old linear model to a new closed loop model is not as easy as it looks like, it requires a thoughtful collaboration, creating synergies between the systems, participation, resilience mindset (which involves rethinking, redefining, and reinventing our priorities, resources, skills), political momentum, connectivity, diversity and most importantly systems thinking. Study is conceptual and qualitative in nature. Analysis of interviews together with the literature forms the basis of the research study. The study suggest that the circular economy must embed a strong sociological basis to manage both slow social variables such as company culture, employee’s mindset, human capital, worker habit and feedbacks.